


A Guide to a Place beyond Maps

by Lessandra



Category: Interstate 60 (2002)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 06:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21174929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lessandra/pseuds/Lessandra
Summary: It seemed like an obvious—good—ending. Lynn Linden, standing in front of him, and loving his art, and real. They’re standing in front of the picture he painted for them; of them; they are on the inside of it.But that’s the thing, isn’t it? She doesn’t know it.





	1. Odyssey

* * *

_You tell me this is a journey_

_you’ve always wanted to take._

_You ask me to tell you what I want._

“Old Territory. New Maps” — by Deborah A. Miranda

* * *

A good road trip is like a story: a whirlwind beginning, a rewarding finish, and things happen along the way that you cannot predict.

Neal doesn’t know if his story started the day he turned twenty-two, or on the night he first dreamt of Lynn, or on the day he started on the Interstate for the first time, or the day he started on it for the second.

He doesn’t know the ending either. He though he found it when he woke up and it was still September 18. And then he thought he found it when he met Lynn all over again for the first time. Now he thinks—maybe he’s still looking.

It seemed like an obvious—_good_—ending. Lynn Linden, standing in front of him, and loving his art, and real. She smiles and talks and moves and smells like she did the night before, and he is giddy with the sense of déjà vu and with the sight of her. They’re standing in front of the picture he painted for them; of them; they are on the inside of it.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? She doesn’t know it.

——o——

Neal has no idea if him remembering is an oversight, or a parting gift, or a parting fuck-you. He just does. And she just doesn’t. It seems greedy to be disappointed over it when she’s his perfect proven match. She was meant for him, or he for her, and she might not remember it, but he does. Knows that they work out, he’s seen the ending of their story. So, of course, he goes for it. Except.

Except, he goes back to his place, and there are dozens of portraits of her that he doesn’t know how to explain, and Nancy keeps staring at Lynn in an unsubtle manner because she sees the resemblance.

Except, the day that they spent on the Interstate, that one glorious improbable day—they clicked. And she didn’t need explaining. She knew she made a wish, and her wish came true, and that wish was him, and he—well, he also came there wishing.

Except, this is all he wants to talk about anymore.

He thinks about Otis, from the stocking crew in the warehouse, and their last conversation. Seeing a world that others don’t even know exists, and feeling a different rhythm, like you’re special.

Neal does feel special now, and feels guilty for feeling special. And it’s not like he doesn’t try to explain it to Lynn, too. Sits her down and wants to let her in, to drag her back in, and—she just smiles, and smiles, and doesn’t believe him. Thinks he has an artist’s mind, and metaphors, and imagination, and _‘You think awfully high of yourself, mister, if you think you’re my prince,’_ and her smile is coy, and maddeningly charming, and he ends up kissing her in exasperation and wants to give up and fall in love with her.

Only, it isn’t that she merely humors him, or disbelieves him. It actually rolls off of her. Like the Interstate hasn’t just been erased out of her mind, but like she’s been given an immunity shot against it. Like all those other blind people, who looked at him weird when he asked what the sign said and they thought it was blank. She has become like all those other people.

——o——

It starts with: he sees things.

Things like, they make a drive-by a gas station once. It’s a sight to behold, too: a giant horse head sits on top of it, its plastic mane flowing. It probably looks tacky in the sunlight, but it’s dusk, and the dying sunlight makes it look sleek and magical.

Neal gets out of the car while Lynn is browsing the magazines on the rack. The attendant is sitting in a lawn chair right by the door. He lets his sunglasses slip down his nose and looks at Neal with sharp eyes. “What’s wrong with your car, boy?” he asks.

Neal startles and looks behind himself, and his car is suddenly bright red again, and all busted up—busted up because he drove it off a canyon cliff, didn’t he? It look undriveable. Lynn is leaning against it, none the wiser.

“No,” he mutters, and closes his eyes, and clears his head, calms the pounding in his chest, and when he opens his eyes, it’s the same gift-car from before, sans the road trip it never took, and he and his dad compromised, too: different plates, a boring normal string of numbers and letters, and Neal picked out the proper cobalt blue he would have preferred as a coat of paint. It was a gesture, to toss back the keys in his face, and it felt nice and satisfying. But he does need a car, and he kind of got a feel for it on the Interstate.

“This is the car,” he says to the attendant, like he expects him to see the change as well. “I need you to fill up _this_ car.” He’s probably being nonsensical.

“Ah. This car,” the man nods, like he does see, like it all makes perfect sense. “Got stories, doesn’t it?” He spits out a wad of tobacco onto the asphalt, and takes Neal’s money for the gas. “You got stories in you, too.”

Neal is, technically, used to weird, but he still doesn’t know what to do with this brand of ominous weird. He says nothing, and hurriedly fiddles with the hose.

“Take care now,” is the only other thing the man tells him, tipping his straw hat at him. Neal nods and climbs into the driver seat.

“You okay?” Lynn asks.

“Super,” he says, and plasters on a smile. Lets one hand loose off the steering wheel and takes her hand, intertwines their fingers, grounding himself. And takes great care to notice exactly which path he’s taking out of here and back to St. Louis.

Next day, all on his own, he carefully traces it back, and ends up swerving over to the side of the road and just sitting there. Because there’s nothing there anymore. An empty lush field. No matter how much he closes and opens his eyes, recalling something different, it is only ever corn and grass and nothing else.

——o——

Ray did warn him, (or maybe reassured him,) in that very first moment they met. That he’d be able to perceive things differently from here on out.

And so he does. He knows the world is different, and he cannot unknow it.

——o——

He still does the job. Drives in and out and around St. Louis and draws motels. Quaint Americana sceneries. Some of them look like they’d belong on the Interstate. The thing about St. Louis is—it has never been a not weird place to live in.

He drives past the Zombie Road and wonders if there _are_ actual shadow people there; if there are ghosts in the Fox Theater, because why not; if there _is_ a secret path to be unlocked in the “seven gates” of Collinsville. It gnaws at him, knowing that there’s a different world out there.

“Are you doing okay?” Nancy asks him, when they have dinner together.

“Why?” he asks, honestly.

“You just seem very tightly wound lately. Or. I don’t know.” She picks at her food. Doesn’t want to overstep. “Not wound, but—like something’s missing?”

_Yeah, my girlfriend’s memories,_ he wants to say acerbically, but doesn’t. That, and any semblance of a resolution. What’s missing is the final paragraph that would make sense.

It seemed like a victory, to have left the Interstate. Like he’s bested it. But he’s got nothing in the end, not even the thing he came there for, which was: an answer. He only has more questions.

——o——

It dawns on him quickly, although not fast enough. A memory. The Stomach Guy, and Neal asking him _‘Do you still love it?’_ And his face as he shook his head, the twist of his mouth, and Grant’s condolatory but merciless expression. You wish what you wish for, and then you reap what you sow, and you ought to be more fucking careful, and that is exactly what this is.

Neal remembers. And she doesn’t. And it will poison them, _him_, suck all the joy out of them, one day at a time, until there’s no more love left, only resentment. And he’ll end up just like that guy and his answer of, _No, now it’s a drag._

And Lynn’s wonderful, and he doesn’t want that, so he scrambles to salvage it as best as he can.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her helplessly, feeling like a heel. It’s late evening, they’re at a café, carefully chosen by him so that it wouldn’t promote any overly romantic ideas, and they’re enjoying themselves, or they should be, but the sight of food only makes him think of that guy again, and the same damned thing. “I don’t want to lose you. I like you—_so_ much. In another life, I think, we could have been really great. But. I can’t. Things have happened to me recently that I’m still—trying to figure out? Figure out my life? Broke it off with my dad, yeah?” he prompts, because she knows these things, and he hopes she can fashion a better excuse for him in her head than he can in the now. “I think we should just—” he waves his hand. “I wouldn’t be good for you.”

It was so much easier to break it off with Sally. He just wanted her to go, so he came home from the hospital, and told her it was over, it wasn’t working, and then let her have at him. She was more irritated with him than anything else, like it was another project he gave up on, didn’t apply himself enough, ruined her social experiment. Really sums up their entire relationship quite succinctly.

She tried to be mean on her way out, too. She’s a psych major, after all, she had always known his weaknesses, so she went for the jugular. _‘Your father’s right about you,’_ she said. It would have pissed him off, before. Would have probably hurt, too, just like she intended. But she didn’t know that it hadn’t been a day away since she last saw him. Hadn’t even been a road trip away. It had been a whole different person away. This Neal knew the world, and himself, and his place in it. And that she had no place in it with him.

But Lynn does, is the thing. He doesn’t want to let her go. He just doesn’t want to string her along either.

She smiles at him, in that way that she does, which is a tad sharper than just a smile, but still isn’t a smirk. “Don’t hurt yourself there, Romeo,” she helps him out of his miserable monologue. There’s an unhurt calmness about her.

She stirs her cappuccino in a perfect circle. It’s slow and particular. It pains him how familiar and endearing it is to him, this one little gesture, and how he loves it about her, how he knows and loves so many little things about her, and how all of it is just not enough.

She shrugs elegantly. “Can’t say I’m not disappointed,” she says honestly. “But I appreciate that you’re grown-up enough to say it early.”

It makes him swallow, because he knows what she means, and it isn’t true what she means. In the real world, to Lynn’s knowledge, they’ve been seeing each other slow and proper. Three weeks of dinner dates, and walks in the park, and long warm phone calls, and going to the movies, and they’ve made out properly only a couple of times, and nothing else. And she’s grateful to him right now that it’s nothing else. Easier to come back from nothing else.

Only it isn’t nothing. It’s another mindfuck. And a total invasion of privacy. Because in St. Louis she may have kissed him like the first chapter, the first sentence, a sense of discovery. But on the Interstate she kissed him like the grand finale, like she knew him in and out, like she had just spent a year in prison waiting for him. And he knows how she looked when he made her come, and the drowsy aftersmile of her orgasm. And she has not consented to him having these memories. Not in this lifetime.

He clears his throat and looks away, flushing furiously. Just one more reason why it would be a horrible idea.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, ever if she doesn’t know why.

She nods. Doesn’t say there’s nothing to be sorry for, but graciously accepts.

Neal reaches for the pitcher and pours himself a glass of water, and downs it whole, washing down the guilt and the fear. He hopes he _did_ say it early enough. He hopes they _do_ come back from it. They are meant to be, after all, they get along so indescribably well. It just doesn’t have to be a love story.

——o——

Afterwards, the first thing he does is drive to the warehouse he used to work at, where the posters used to hang. Like he expects them to still hold all the answers, or some kind of clues. But the boards are as empty as they can be.

Otis waves at him with his meaty hand and pulls him into a bear hug. “Where did you disappear to?” he demands with a warm smile.

“Took your advice,” Neal grins back. “Ditched the job. Went to chase the dream.”

“Good man,” Otis chuckles and slaps him on the shoulder. “Did you get the girl?”

Neal shrugs evasively. “Turns out, maybe, she isn’t exactly what I was looking for.”

“What else is there?” Otis laughs at him, like he’s young and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“A different rhythm?” Neal reminds him, and Otis laughs his loud belly laugh and nods approvingly.

He drives to 555 Olive Street again, with no real hope either. Ray isn’t waiting for him there. He doubts anything is. The elevator doesn’t work for him anymore. Or works properly, as engineering has intended, depending on how you look at it. Maybe it’s that he doesn’t have an appointment. But when he presses 10 and 3 together, the elevator goes up and opens its doors at floor 3, and Neal’s heart sinks as the doors close and the elevator takes him up to floor 10, and that’s the end of that.

He goes home and packs a bag, again. Leaves a message for his folks and Nancy, again, or maybe for the first time. And goes down the same highway, looking for the same stop sign, the same overpass. Takes a couple of Bob Dylan’s casettes with him, for thematic company.

In the car, where his eightball used to sit, he places a plastic bag with the candle that he saved. The last candle to go out, Grant told him. Take it with you if you want your wish granted. He found it tucked in the get-well bouquet in his hospital room, along with the other thing he takes with him. The seven of red spades, courtesy of _The Rainbow Club_. He clips it onto the sun visor, where the Ace of Hearts used to sit.

“For luck,” he tells the card, and his own reflection.

_He asked poor Howard where can I go, Howard said there’s only one place I know,_ Dylan’s rusty voice jumps eagerly out of the speakers at him.

“Only one place I know, too,” Neal mutters. “Only it’s not Highway 61 I’m trying to revisit.”

It takes him eight albums to travel the entire stretch of Highway 61 between I-64 all the way down to I-40 and back, and he finds absolutely no indication of any entrances where he could slip back into the place that he really wants to go to.

It takes him a day to get to Virginia, to the start of Highway 60, and then another three days to travel all the way west to where it ends, slow-paced, and paying careful attention, and it never turns into anything but the same Highway.

Another week and a half by Route 66 that was nearly the official I-60. He stops rushing. He isn’t getting anywhere anyway. He makes long stops by beautiful out-of-the-way motels and hole-in-the-wall cafés, the really special ones, and paints. He mails them all back to St. Louis, to _Danver Publishing_.

Just for himself, he paints the Interstate as well. Memory, in a way, is more honest than a photograph. A photo is sharp, is crystallizing, is a moment of clarity, and, well, Neal’s never been very clear on most things in his life. Certainly doesn’t feel very clear on anything now. But the blur of paint across canvas, it’s not about the visual, it’s a feeling. It evokes a memory, the same way a song can make you feel heartbreak. Like an evening-lit road the color of burnt sienna and vandyke brown and raw umber, and a carmine sliver of the sunset.

——o——

The posters don’t look like before, when he sees them. It’s not Lynn’s adorable freckled face, with bright colors and playful hints. It’s black font on white billboard, too serious for the Interstate, which may be a sign of its own, how unwelcoming it all looks. The only word the sign says is: “**COLD**.” That, and there’s a black rhombus in the upper left corner.

Neal glances at the card tucked away above his head. “Black of diamonds,” he says to himself.

He drives the opposite way, spurred by what he thinks is advice, but on the other end of the journey is another frosty billboard with the same frosty message. “**STILL COLD**.”

It’s like he’s circling the door and can’t seem to find it. Not so special now, after all, if he keeps missing it like everyone else.

Road-tired, he stops by an all-too familiar diner. He’s never been here before, but he’s in this diner every day: passes a hundred of them on the road, red seats, tiled black-and-white floors, looking like a 50s stock photo, utterly indistinguishable. Only serves to underline how he’s running in circles. It looks like it’s been thought up on the side of the highway by sheer force of human expectation.

“You ready to ordah?” a waitress is upon him nearly the moment he sits down. She’s chewing bubble gum obnoxiously. Her bun is a little skewed to the side.

“Uh,” he says, his eyes travelling across the words of the menu blankly, and he looks behind her to the wall, where the specials are written on a board. He points at it. “How about today’s specials?”

The girl stops chewing the gum and looks at him with narrowed eyes. “You wanna know ‘bout the speshuls?” she asks, in a tone like he has personally insulted her.

“Yeah?” he says carefully.

She resumes chewing, pondering him, and still looking indignant, and then hollers, “Holly?” —_“What?” _a woman that is presumably Holly answers from the back of the café. “There’s a guy here asking about the speshuls!” — _“I’ll be right there!”_

She looks at him again, and chews at him, and says, “She’ll be right with you,” like he hasn’t heard.

Holly turns out to be a middle-aged woman with a short bob of a haircut, looking only slightly younger than Neal’s mother. “So. You wanted to know about the specials?” she asks, slightly out of breath.

Neal stares at her. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Is there a problem?”

“Not at all,” she smiles pleasantly at him and looks at the board. “Which one has picked your interest?”

Neal keeps staring at her, wondering what the hell is wrong with this picture, and if maybe they add dogfood to their shepherd’s pie here, or something. Two types of specials menus in this world: ones that cultivate customers, and ones that are made using leftover ingredients.

“The braised rib-eye, I guess,” he says. A few months back he would have dawdled and then went with _What would you recommend?_ He’s battling his indecisiveness one small decision at a time.

Holly trails his stare and looks at the words on the board and then at him again. Scribbles the order on her pad. Asks him for his choice of drink. Leaves. Then comes back half a minute later, and sets an envelope in front of him.

“Is—the beef inside?” Neal asks with a nervous laughter.

Holly just looks at him, tapping her foot in the same way the previous girl was chewing gum: somehow _at_ him, and somehow intense.

“Do I have something on my face or—?” he asks.

“You looked at the specials,” is all she says, and looks at the envelope significantly before leaving again.

Neal wants to call after her, but he knows what she’s getting at. Understanding runs up his arms like electricity. He looks behind himself at the wall again, and it’s empty. Well, not empty: there are some ads there, a local band poster. Neal closes his eyes and counts backwards from five. When he opens his eyes, he sees the specials again.

He had a book as a child. _Magic Eye_. Depth perception illusions. You’d cross your eyes, and see a picture within a picture. And then you’d close your eyes, and open them again, and it would be gone. Trying to see the Interstate and places that lead to it kind of works the same way.

Turning back to the table, Neal tears the envelope open and turns it upside down. Only one thing slips out: an austere business card for a car dealership. Neal stares at it, utterly lost, and wonders if there’s a hidden message on this too, if there’s a play on words he’s missing, or if he should hold it over a candle or something.

When the waitress returns with his order, he looks up at her and asks, “Do you know how I would get to Interstate 60 from here?”

She looks at him quizzically and says, “Honey. You’re on it.”

——//——

**  
**


	2. Maddison

Neal decides to drive through the first night as much as he is able. It’s like a chase, now that the thing he’s after is relatively in sight. Nothing seems familiar, but he’s hopeful, out of nostalgia if nothing else. The sheer knowledge that he has made it is spurring him on

There’s hardly any traffic on the Interstate, ever, so he’s caught off-guard when another car swivels out onto the main road behind him, and continues swaying in a loopy line that makes him clench his fists tight around the steering wheel as it starts gaining on him. Faintly, Neal can make out that it’s some kind of a white hatchback, but barely anything other than that. There is a hysterical honk, and the car makes another wild turn, nearly nicking his trunk, before finally finding its way around him and speeding along with one parting honk that manages to sound like an audial version of being flipped off, as if _he_ was the one driving around like a maniac.

He ends up making a stop in a town called Accident, not really taking the name for the warning it clearly is. Accident, as its name implies, reminds him of the really seedy, bad part of town in St. Louis, except in Accident all town is that part of town. The car dealership is only a few miles down the road. He’s exhausted enough, and trusting enough, lulled into a sense of security by the notion that the Interstate will take care of him enough. What would be closer to the truth is that the Interstate will get him where he needs going, but nowhere does it say that she will get him there safe and sound.

He’s awoken only a few (not enough) hours later, by a familiar sound of an alarm blaring abruptly and being cut short, and it takes a few moments for his brain to catch up with his surroundings before he springs out of the bed and rushes to the window. His car is being taken on a joyride by a band of teenagers.

“Fuck,” is all he can think of saying. Shakes his head, and thinks to himself, _I love this highway,_ but doesn’t say it out loud, too aware that there’s a fifty-fifty chance that the Interstate is sentient enough to (a) hear him, (b) understand the note of sarcasm in the sentiment, and (c) take it personally enough that a stolen car would be the least of his problems.

Instead he goes to file a report with the sheriff, with some hopes that the towns on the Interstate have some sort of a connectivity between their departments, because he can’t really expect the two and a half people working in a town of population 300 to do anything about a vehicle that has long since left this town.

The sheriff listens to him with barely concealed disinterest and says, “No.”

“No?” Neal echoes.

The sheriff says, “It wan’t a crime,” swallowing the _s_ in _wasn’t_. “Accident’s a commune. Everything belongs to everyone. By local law, they had the right to take what was left unattended.”

Neal stares at him, and doesn’t know what to do about this insane logic. His father probably would have, but Neal is honestly just too devoid of anything even remotely lawyery to try and argue his point. “Don’t you have tourists?” he says helplessly. “Do you just accost them and take all their stuff?”

“Tourists can register their belongings as privatized,” the sheriff says patiently, but still without an ounce of sympathy.

Neal flashes in his mind to the whooping sounds the kids made when they drove off in his car, and finds himself very much in doubt that any paperwork would have stopped them. “That’s something that maybe you should advertise?” he says instead.

The sheriff just shrugs again, and Neal nods and leaves, because if he truly wanted to beat his head against a wall, he’d go up to a wall and do it.

It isn’t, in all honesty, the car that bothers him. Despite their reluctant reconciliation, it still had an air of disconnect about it. Possibly because a part of him would always think of it as his father’s first; possibly because he would always remember pushing it to its death off the cliffs. Plus, all manner of things happen on the Interstate. Last time, he ended up in jail. What’s a little joyride compared to that.

It isn’t the car, but it’s what was inside of it. The art supplies: still replaceable, but damn expensive, and sufficiently broken in that he hates the idea of changing them. Even worse, the canvas he’s been driving around with. He can create another one, it was all memory the first time too. But it won’t be the same. Art never is. And he would miss it.

——o——

Two days after his near car accident, three towns over from Accident, Neal meets two people he really needed to meet.

The car dealership proves a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he purchases the cheapest dinged-up car there, which serves him only for a couple of days before expiring. The thing is, he really couldn’t have picked better, because the car dealership was seedy and second-hand and generally the worst place to send him for a replacement. He hikes, unadventurously, to the town called Sanddusty, which, counter-intuitively, is almost entirely a waterfront.

“A fitting name,” Neal snorts companionably to the driver of the truck that has taken him this far. The driver looks at him flatly and reaches over and opens the passenger door. “Right, then,” Neal says, and pays him for his troubles, before climbing outside.

He still has no idea where he’s going, but it’s still the Interstate, so he figures, it’s all right.

He makes for the diner, looking around, the way he always does, with an artist’s eye, taking the scenery in, the most minute details, the most mundane of beauties. In the far corner of the parking lot he spots a crookedly parked VW. A white hatchback. Neal eyes it suspiciously, and the Interstate has taught him that nothing’s a coincidence, but also, there are plenty of white cars in the world, and a lot of inconsiderate drivers who park crooked. This parking lot alone has three white cars, so he’s probably just imagining it.

He opens the door to the diner, and is instantly proven wrong. The world is infinitely large, and probably is even larger than he can imagine on the Interstate. But it can be very small, too. Or maybe the highway does look out for him.

Because as Neal settles down at one of the tables and scans the menu—and it’s another black-and-white tiles red-leather seats diner that seems a carbon copy of its siblings—the door swings open, catching Neal’s attention for just a moment and then holding it completely, as in walks the Guy. The Stomach Guy.

Neal feels his fingers grow stiff around the menu as he stares at him, afraid to blink. Like he might vanish just as suddenly as he appeared. He doesn’t. He sits down at the counter, just like he did the last time, and does the same song and dance that he did last time, and people bet on how much he can actually eat. Neal abstains.

“Get in on this action, mister,” the waitress smiles at him winningly. The same waitress that has brought him the menu, and the drink that he ordered. She’s young, and trying to engage him, and has a cute hopeful smile of someone desperately wanting some attention and to get out of this town, and he’s a reasonably good-looking young man about her age, passing through, and maybe he’s someone she’s been waiting for.

Neal looks over at the Stomach Guy, who’s overheard the girl and is staring back with an expression of blank pleasantness. There’s no hint of recognition in his eyes.

“I don’t like to gamble,” he lies. Seems like a decent cop-out.

“Even with a sure thing?” the girl raises an eyebrow at him, and that is _definitely_ a come-on at this point.

“Seems to me, if a man says he can, then maybe he can,” Neal says evenly, wilfully ignoring her advances.

The Guy raises an eyebrow at that statement, nearly a challenge, and some of the other customers who overhear Neal just laugh incredulously, because there’s reasonable doubt, and then there’s the amount of food this man just ordered.

They don’t laugh an hour later, and all of their wallets feel a little emptier, and the guy slides into the seat across from Neal with a content smile. Neal’s been sketching, and the guy watches him for a while without interrupting.

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he says eventually.

Neal is surprised he remembers, between all the diners he’s probably swindled. He reaches his hand across the table. “I’m Neal,” he says.

“Tolbert,” the Stomach Guy finally puts a name to the face, and shakes his hand.

“We’ve met because of Grant,” Neal says.

“O.W. That’s right,” Tolbert nods, smiling. He seems to always be smiling, in this indulgent sort of manner.

“Do you… see him often?” Neal asks, in a burst of foolish hope.

“See him?” Tolbert smiles, surprised. “We don’t exactly mingle in the same circles, young man. He does drop by from time to time. Maybe a couple of times a year. If that many at all.” He considers it honestly, tries to recall to the best of his ability, and doesn’t seem at all perturbed by this arrangement.

“Oh,” Neal says, as his heart sinks. “And you wouldn’t know how to find him, would you?” he asks, without any real hope at all this time.

Tolbert’s smile turns into outright laughter. “Find him? He’s the master of all this and that here at the Interstate. You don’t find him. You don’t ever find him unless he wants to be found, and I reckon, he’s too busy for that anyway, so he only ever finds you.”

Neal leans back in the chair, disappointed. Up until now he didn’t really think about a plan, what he came searching for on the Interstate, except for some peace of mind, and answers. And, well, there’s only one person who can give him answers, isn’t there, so, really, Neal came looking for him. For that breezy feeling as they rode together that first time, and Grant told him things. It’s a stupid thought. The Interstate stretches endless, and Neal’s just one grain of sand in a myriad.

Tolbert stands up from the seat. “Was nice talking to you,” he says, even though Neal isn’t sure why he even chose to talk to him in the first place, he didn’t really get anything out of the conversation.

“If you do,” Neal says quickly, stopping him in his tracks. “If you _do_ see him.” He shrugs. “If he visits. Tell him, Neal Oliver is looking for him.”

——o——

It’s a few hours later—(because Neal first stayed to eat, then stayed for the show, then stayed to sketch)—when Neal finally leaves the diner. His eyes immediately travel to the far end of the parking lot: to reassure himself that all the cars have long since changed, and he’s just imagining things.

The white hatchback is still sitting there, crooked. The car itself is crooked, like it might have had a collision. And as Neal watches it, wondering what to do with the bell of intuition ringing in his head, the car door opens, and out sneaks a girl, a teenager, really. An oversized jacket, match-like thin legs sticking out from under it, and a mess of unkempt hair, is his impression of her. The sketchpad in his bag is begging for a caricature.

What she does is less than cute, though. She prowls behind cars, keeping low, like an alley cat. Like a little thief. Which she is. She’s eyeing unattended bags, checking for inadvisably unlocked cars. Eyeing wallets sticking out of backpockets, although as tempting as those clearly are to her, she isn’t brave enough to reach. She goes around the row of cars, systematically checking every door for a possible breach. There is a fat wallet sitting in the driver’s seat of one car. She shrugs off her jacket and wraps it around her arm, wrist to elbow, and Neal knows what’s about to happen, and more than his own experiences, it’s pure fearful _instinct_, knowledge that seems to come to him through the ground itself, that pushes him forward, because while it’s generally not advisable to steal, here is the last place you want to do it.

“Stop,” he says, jogging up to her.

She spins around and stares at him, eyes burning with distrust more than fear.

“Get off me,” she snaps, when he’s about to place a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey. It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t bite. But you shouldn’t do this.”

The girl stares at him stubbornly, and resolutely refuses to acknowledge what he’s talking about.

“You just shouldn’t,” he says again.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” she says, shrugging the jacket back on. There’s a familiar drawl to her voice.

“Sure you weren’t,” he says flatly. “I’m just saying. Take care not to do that in the future as well.”

“Uh-huh,” the girl says.

And that should really be it, he should let this go, but maybe it’s the drawl, or maybe it’s the attitude, or the white hatchback, but Neal continues standing there, and he says, “You aren’t from around here, are you?”

The girl snorts. “Like I’d tell you.”

Which is a fair point, but Neal patiently says, “I mean the Interstate.”

She gives him a look, like he’s a moron. “You can’t be from around an interstate.”

Neal stares her up and down. “No,” he says. “Not usually. But you know that this place is… special, though. Right?”

And something finally gives in the girl’s exterior at that. Eases off, like a faint glimmer of hope. “Special how?” she says, her voice tight. And Neal sees in her eyes that she already knows _how_, but she also has _no_ _idea_ how, and wonders how she even ended up here, and why.

“Special, like instant karma special. Just rewards special. Special, like if you steal, it won’t end well for you special,” he says.

She keeps staring at him, studying him, trying to decide if he’s full of shit. He studies her back. Her hair isn’t just a mess, it’s an unwashed mess, and she looks vaguely like she may have not had a proper bath, or food, or sleep in a couple of days.

“Let me buy you dinner,” Neal says.

The eyes immediately go from curious to suspicious. He raises his hands placatingly, and doesn’t even feel insulted. He’s a stranger who has cornered her in the dark parking lot, and he’s a grown man, at least from where she stands, and she looks barely fifteen.

“Easy,” he says. “You just look like you need it. And maybe need to tell someone what the hell happened to you. It’s a public place. Full of people. Nothing can hurt you there.”

“And what’s in it for you?”

Neal shrugs, and doesn’t know how to put it in words that she would understand.

“I just know what it’s like to be here and need to rely on the kindness of strangers.”

He’s had lucky breaks on the Interstate, before. Seems only fair that he would be a lucky break for someone else.

——o——

The staff is mildly surprised to see him back in the diner. “Back so soon,” the flirty waitress smiles at him. He just shrugs. He lets the girl order anything she wants.

“Promise,” he says, when she still eyes him untrustingly. “I’m good for it.”

He asks for a coffee for himself, and pulls out the sketchbook. Her eyes follow the pages as he flips them.

“You an artist?” she asks.

“Of a sort,” Neal says. He doesn’t feel established enough to brag about anything. The concept, however, puts her mind at ease enough that she finally orders a BLT with a side of fries, and a milkshake. Probably, in her mind, being a dopey painter somewhat absolves him of the possibility of being a serial killer.

“I’m Neal, by the way.”

She doesn’t rise to the occasion. He doesn’t push, and sketches out a little alley cat caricature of her prowling the parking lot, and flips the pad towards her for examination. She chuckles a little, but her smile is forced.

“So what’s this Interstate?” she asks.

Neal closes the sketchbook and puts it away. “I don’t really know that there’s a simple answer.”

“I’ve got time.”

Neal shrugs. “I guess I said that because I don’t know myself,” he says honestly.

_You know more than I do,_ her eyes seem to say. He’s the adult to her, he reminds himself. The only adult who bothered to be concerned.

“There are people who just live here, see. Towns that aren’t on any maps at all. And hell if I know how that works. If they know that they are in a special part of the world, somehow. Some of them seem to know this place is tricky, the rest have no idea. A friend of mine once told me that this is the real final frontier. That at the dawn of young America, from the first moment the first immigrant set foot from the boat onto the shore, there was always someone who wanted to go a little further. And when the land ran out, they still made more land for themselves, for the people with a particular brand of idiocy to their name, and an itchiness to their stride.” (That’s what Mr. Cody told him, musing out loud, with equal measure aged affection and aged bitterness. Neal likes that image, doesn’t mind imagining he has both of those, a brand of stupid and an itchiness to his existence.) “Anyway, I don’t know how much of that is true, but I know that people also end up here who don’t really belong. Like you and me. People who _wish_ for things. I ended up here searching for an answer. A friend of mine ended up here searching for true love.”

Neal doesn’t elaborate that neither of them really found what they were looking for. The girl looks gutted by his explanation and hides her eyes, even as the food is placed before her. She doesn’t eat.

“That’s what my dad came here for,” she says quietly. “True love.”

Neal looks at her uncertainly. “Is your mom?—”

She shakes her head. “A long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” he still says. She shrugs.

“I don’t know where he got the idea, anyway,” she says, and her voice suddenly becomes wobbly, before spilling out and erasing all traces of the tough façade she was trying to present. Neal smiles nervously at the customers who begin to stare, some with curiosity, others with concern. “But he suddenly really wanted to go. It was supposed to be our adventure.”

She lowers her head, curtaining off her face with her hair, which does very little, and Neal finds himself sitting helplessly across a girl who is crying into her plateful of BLT.

——o——

“I haven’t really talked to anybody—_really_ talked to—in like a week,” she tells him afterwards.

Afterwards, when they are outside again, him having finished off his coffee, and her having finished crying. She was silent as she ate, wolfing the food down. After coaxing her into a crowded place where he thought she’d feel safe, the irony was: she didn’t want to talk about anything important with so many people around. The diner was just too real, and what was happening to her was too far from it. He sort of knows the feeling.

“You’ve been on your own this whole time?” Neal asks. She shrugs, which is a sort of a _yes_. Neal laughs, nodding at the hatchback. “And let me guess. You’ve been driving _that_ car. Which you don’t know how to drive.”

“What’s funny?” she snaps at him immediately.

“You almost ran me over on the road two nights ago,” he says.

“Oh. Small world,” she mumbles.

“It’s really not. It’s this highway.”

“You keep saying that,” she says.

“Yeah,” he agrees, without elaborating. “You wanna tell me what happened to you?”

She studies him for a long moment, and it’s like she said: she hasn’t had anyone else to tell this to. So yeah, she wants to.

“My father’s here somewhere,” she says. Sinks her hands into the pockets of her overgrown jacket, which, Neal suspects in this moment, must have belonged to the man in question, and rummages there a little, before pulling out a black calling card. One side of it says _Equinox_ in an elegant gold font, the other: an address. “You said you came here looking for something?” she goes back to studying him.

“Yeah. I thought I was taking a job. And maybe a vacation. I found more things than I bargained for.” She keeps staring at him. “Why?”

“My father came here for a reason too. But he’s—not himself,” she says quietly. “It’s like he’s bespelled.”

“I… don’t know anything about that,” Neal admits. “I came here because I asked for it, and I left because I found what I was looking for.” (_Or so I thought,_ he doesn’t add.)

The girl’s face grows darker for a moment, as she considers it. That maybe whatever her father ended up mixed up in, he’s asked for it, too.

“You said he came here looking for love?” he asks gently.

“I don’t know. Maybe? I thought we were just taking a father-daughter trip, some bonding time. But he met this woman. And then he couldn’t think of anything else.”

Neal takes the card from her hands and looks at it.

“I can drive you here,” he says. “Help you find him.” It feels like getting attuned to the highway again, and knowing when it is pushing him to things. Even if it isn’t, he can’t very well leave this kid on her own.

She gives him a look of consideration.

“My name is Maddison,” she says a few moments later, as she straps herself into the seat beside him.

——o——

The thing is, he really should have known better than to imagine he could know what this is about, what he’s met Maddison for. What he thought was: he would arrive, and make some speech, a few _How could you’s_, reminding her father that he has an amazing kid, and that’s all that matters, that’s the truest of all loves, and that is the wise Aesopian takeaway here, isn’t it?

Turns out, it’s really not.

Neal isn’t sure what _Equinox_ even is. It isn’t a club, it isn’t a hotel, it isn’t really anything. A black building with a yellow neon sign, and on the inside it’s the same cubic black, no furniture, no nothing. Only doors.

A woman steps out to greet them, and Maddison tugs his sleeve and quickly says, “That’s her.” She isn’t what Neal was expecting. She’s in her late forties, or early fifties, wearing a modest dress, and her red lipstick is classy rather than sultry. Her smooth blonde hair is sporting unabashed gray. Nothing about her screams ‘home wrecker’.

She cocks her head, like a curious bird, and says, “May I help you?”

And Neal feels entirely out of his depth, but Maddison’s counting on him to find something to say, so what he says is, “Yes. Hi. I’m Neal.”

“Vivian,” the woman smiles at him pleasantly. It seems genuine.

Neal nods and squeezes Maddison’s shoulder. “We, uh, seem to have misplaced this girl’s father.”

Vivian looks at Maddison then, and seems genuinely apologetic when she says, “I’m sorry. Let me go fetch him.”

She goes back down the hall and disappears through one of the doors. They wait a minute, then another, before she comes back, and Maddison perks up, and then breaks into a sprint, crashing into the man that Vivian has led out.

“Dad!” she shouts, relieved. Vivian moves to stand by Neal’s side, patient and composed.

“Heartbreaking,” she says. Her voice sounds older than she looks.

“Hey, ladybug,” her father says, hugging Maddison close. He seems happy to see her.

“Why is it heartbreaking?” Neal asks quietly. “Why is he here?” His mind is imagining all kinds of possibilities. He remembers his own contract, signed in blood. His was done mostly in jest, but suddenly he wonders if there are more ominous powers here.

“I thought I would never find you,” Maddison is babbling. “Can we leave? When can we leave? I wanna go home.”

The man’s face goes red, and he says: “I am tired, Maddison. It’s too hard. When am I supposed to live for me?”

Maddison steps out of his hands and stares at him. “You’re my dad,” she says.

“I don’t want to be a dad, I want to be a guy. I want to take a woman out sometimes, and take vacations, and pick up a hobby. I want my own time.” His face is growing purple now.

“What the hell is wrong with him?” Neal hisses.

“He doesn’t want to be saying these things,” Vivian answers. “But he’s compelled to speak truthfully, much to his shame.”

They aren’t as quiet as they think they are, and Maddison whirls around and stares at the woman. “You’re _lying_! You did something! You bitch!” She throws herself at Vivian, ready to pummel her with fists, and Neal dives across to prevent it. Her father reaches for her as well, and embraces her.

“I miss you, ladybug, but I just miss me more,” he mutters. “I don’t want to go back home.”

The fists land on him instead of Vivian. “I hate you,” Maddison says hoarsely. “I hate you, I hate you!” She tears herself away from his hands and runs out.

Neal stands there, uselessly, helplessly, and doesn’t know if he should run after her, what he could possibly say if he did, how he can be a person she can lean on. Her world just exploded.

It isn’t something he can comprehend, at all. His father and him have their issues, and in his least charitable moments Neal thinks he should not have been a father, really, because he doesn’t know how to be one. He’s not a bad person, he’s just bad at being a parent, bad at even _trying_, but he tries a lot, takes the job very seriously, in fact, hence the issue: in him imposing his views and values on Neal. It’s a warped love, sometimes, and it isn’t an excuse, but the thought is there.

He has no idea, however, what to do about a parent who never even _wanted_ to be a parent, but became one anyway.

“What the hell is your damage, lady?” he turns to Vivian.

She looks at him, unimpressed. “My damage?” she says. “The man didn’t want his own daughter. The damage _really_ isn’t mine.”

“He was her dad. _Is_ her dad. I don’t care if he was unhappy, he was at least doing his job.”

“You think that’s healthy, do you?” she nettles. “Living with a parent who is slowly coming to despise you?” She waves her hand dismissively. “The girl has an aunt. She will grow up loved with her.”

“Yeah. ‘Cause this wasn’t traumatizing.”

Vivian looks at him with contempt, then turns to the father. “Tell me you were fine, before I made you confront this. That you lived fine.”

The man’s face reddens again, in anger and impotence both, and he opens his mouth, and no sound comes out.

“Tell me you love your daughter.”

He can’t say that either, it turns out.

“Well. You heard it from the horse’s mouth,” she says, and smiles a small sharp smile, snapping her fingers, and then there’s no man in the room anymore. Instead of him, stands the proverbial horse.

Vivian pets its nose with equal part like and condescension.

“It’s really better like this for everyone, Mr. Oliver,” she says. And turns her back on him, the conversation over, the horse obediently clip-clopping its hooves after her across the black floor.

——o——

The thing that Neal forgot is that the Interstate may be a magical place, but it isn’t a fix-all place, it isn’t a _happy_ place. It’s unfair, and fucked-up as anywhere else. Maybe more than anywhere else because the Interstate is _id_ ran rampant.

While Maddison sleeps in the car, Neal sits outside, looking at the night sky. He isn’t good at stars so he can’t tell if it’s a known sky, or if stars above the Interstate are unlike the rest of the world.

A shooting star passes through the sky, taunting him. “Yeah, right,” Neal mutters into the empty air. “I know better, thanks.”

He ends up thinking of Banton and Morlaw. More-law. Funny in hindsight. He probably ended up there for a reason. The reason being: he was being shipped off to law school which would have turned him into _that_, made him the same as the crazed citizens of that town. But the town was already there regardless of whether Neal ended up in it or not. And people who lived there got off on it. Or maybe they didn’t, maybe it was a hell of their own making. Like Banton, where he saw a mother give up her entire life for her son—a polar opposite of what has just happened here. Banton was a trial of another sort, that looked at him, at his constant worry over making choices, and offered him a drug and said: here, and you won’t ever have to make a single choice, you won’t ever need answers, you would just be happy. He has to wonder if Grant would have just left him there, forever, or if he would still wake up in his hospital with no memories of anything. Neal really can’t pretend that he knows how any of this works. And anyway, this isn’t the point.

The point is: there is a father who never really wanted to be a father. The father wanted to feel good about himself, and that’s that, that’s the decision he made while looking at his daughter. And you can’t come back from that.

“Rough night?” a man’s voice interrupts his thoughts. They’re both getting midnight shopping done at the local 24/7. No harm in a friendly chat, but no point in it either. Neal plasters a polite reserved smile on his face and doesn’t say anything.

“This is some crazy highway,” the stranger says with an easy laugh. Neal pretends not to watch him but does. He’s wearing a tight three-piece suit, but there’s ink peeking from underneath his sleeves and collar. The watch he’s wearing is flashy but inexpensive. His eyes are kohl-rimmed and intense.

“Can’t quit it though, amiright?” he says. “The feel of the journey. Ever since we rode horses, man.” He stops in front of the liquor shelf and looks at it with appreciation and longing, but it’s too late of an hour to purchase anything. If Interstate even has alcohol laws—they’re technically not in any state.

The gentleman looks at Neal and leans against a shelf. “You know. I can help you find him.”

Neal inhales sharply and stiffens. “What?” he says in a stilted voice, without exhaling.

“The wishmaster of this highway. You’re looking for him, right? I could grant you a wish, too.”

Neal feels the air grow thicker and hotter in a flash. Maybe that’s just his brain playing tricks on him. The whole world seems to crystallize into perfectly compact segments for him: him and Maddison, and him and Lynn, and him and St. Louis, and him and the Interstate, and he thought he was here just looking for the road, but that’s not right, and this man has hit the nail on the head. He’s been only ever looking for Grant.

“It’s just an innocent little wish,” the man steps closer, mistaking Neal’s stunned silence for refusal.

“Wishes aren’t innocent,” Neal answers automatically, then meets the stranger’s eyes. “And this isn’t little. The man doesn’t want to be found, and, anyway, you’re wrong, I’m not looking for him. I already found what I was looking for.”

“Liar,” the man smiles. It’s an oily expression on his face—and it’s a weird featureless face, too, Neal can’t quite grasp at the edges of it. “This entire highway knows you’re looking for him. So let me find him for you.”

“Oh, is that how it works?” Neal asks sharply. “How you work? You don’t know where he is, do you? But you have to accomplish your task. So if I wish for it, you’ll know where he is. That’s what you want, right? To learn where he is for yourself? How about, no. How about I just leave.”

The man laughs, the sound as oily as his smile, almost wet in his throat. “You’re smarter than you look, kid.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Neal bites out. “I got places to be. Waste someone else’s time.” He turns on his feet and stomps over to the cash register. When he chances a look behind his shoulder, to see if he’s still being watched, the kohl-eyed man is gone.

——o——

In the morning, Neal takes Maddison out for a pancake breakfast. He has driven late through the night while she slept to make it to a different town. Didn’t want her waking up anywhere near _Equinox_.

“Is there anywhere at all I can take you?” he asks her. “You have an aunt, right?”

“Yes,” she says quietly, poking at her plate. “Can you take me there? Take me home?” And what she really means is, _Do you know a way **out** of here?_ And Neal freezes.

He knows what she’s about to ask before she says anything. He thinks a part of him has always known, from the second he heard the familiar drawl. The “ar” in her “f_ar_k” and “n_ar_th” and “m_ar_ning”. His own family ended up moving to St. Louis when his father got a promotion, but neither of them were St. Louis-born, and him and Nance were old enough that the accent didn’t really rub off on them. But there was no mistaking it when Maddison talked.

Which, he supposes, is the entire point of why the Interstate sent him to her, or her to him, when it could have been anyone else. It was a polite tap on the shoulder, letting him know what’s what. _Go home, Neal. There’s nothing for you here._

That’s what Neal really thinks when in the moment he asks, “Where’s home?”

And Maddison says, “St. Louis.”

And she’s all alone, he’s all she’s got, so there’s no other answer but yes.

——o——

**ARE YOU SURE?**

The letters across the billboard seem to be mocking him. Neal wraps his fingers tight around the steering wheel; his heart sinks.

He has never been too good at paradoxes. His father loved those. His favorite one was: ‘A law student enters tutelage, and the agreement between him and his teacher is that he will pay for the education after winning his first case. The student then doesn’t go into law, and the teacher sues him for payment. The teacher says: if I win, then by letter of the law, you pay me, but if I lose, you win your first case, and by letter of our contract you still pay me. The student says: if I win, by letter of the law I do not have to pay. If I lose, the contract isn’t completed, and I don’t have to pay still. So which one of them is right?’

It’s a circular logic puzzle with no exit, and so is this. A catch-22. He cannot not help the girl. She’s defenseless, and alone in the world, and there is no scenario in this world where he doesn’t help her. But he cannot help her and stay on the highway. The paths diverge and are mutually exclusive. Both cannot be right, but he needs both of them to be right.

He glances to the seat next to him. Maddison is drowning out her pain by singing along to _Take On Me_. He smiles, and steps on the gas, driving past the sign that says:

**FINAL EXIT**

The road makes a sudden U-turn, and on the way back it’s suddenly a completely different road, and there is another sign greeting him.

It’s twelve miles to St. Louis.

——//——


	3. Passage

Maddison’s aunt, to the surprise of no one, is highly alarmed and suspicious of the whole circumstance.

“Maddie!” he greets her, half-delighted half-stunned. Maddison’s lips wobble, and she bursts into tears, tucking her face into her aunt’s chest. Neal hasn’t really seen her cry this entire time since she ran out of _Equinox_—if she did, by the time he followed she already pulled herself together, so he can only be impressed.

“Shh, shh, what’s wrong?” the aunt is whispering, pulling the girl tighter to herself.

Maddison sniffs, and shakes her head, and runs into the house.

“What happened?” the woman demands, as Neal fidgets uncomfortably on the porch. “Who are you?”

“I’m nobody,” he waves his hand in an ‘it’s-inconsequential’ gesture. “I just met your niece and was trying to help. Her father took her for a trip, but—I don’t know how to say it, but he decided not to come back. He left her. Your brother decided he was done being a father and left. You’re all she’s got, and she’s gonna need some help working through _that_.”

The woman stares at him and swallows. “Who the fuck are you?” she asks again, her voice hoarse and scared. “What did you do to my brother?”

Neal winces, and realizes how it all must sound. “I’m sorry,” he promises. “I didn’t do anything, this isn’t some elaborate ploy. He just decided he was done. You’re his sister, you must have had an inkling.”

She shakes her head, but in her eyes there’s a glimmer of recognition, so he suspects she does know something of the sort.

“Do you love your niece more than he loved her?” Neal asks quietly. “I don’t want to just dump her on you if—”

“How dare you,” she stops him. Neal shuts up and shrugs: the question was fair, all things considered.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “For everything. I know this is hard. He might return one day. I honestly have no idea how these things work.”

“These things?” she echoes.

He shrugs again. He honestly has no idea what the hostess of _Equinox_ is doing to her captives, if she is reforming them somehow on her horse ranch. He certainly hopes that’s the case.

Maddison lurks out from within the apartment again, and hugs him brusquely around the waist. “Thanks, Neal,” she says. He smiles and pets her hair. The aunt still watches them with sheer astonishment, but the display somewhat curbs her suspicion that Neal is some kind of a messenger for the mob.

“Can I bother you for a pen and paper?” he says. “I would like to leave my number with you, for Maddison. In case she needs someone to talk to who was there with her.”

“Was where with her?” the aunt echoes, rummaging through her bag before providing him with a notepad and a pen. He doesn’t answer, but looks at Maddison, and she looks back, and he scribbles down his number and even his address.

“What are you gonna do now?” she asks quietly.

He shrugs. Probably return to his art—that’s as far as he can ever plan. He hasn’t thought past that.

Maddison is shrewder about his silence than he would have given her credit for. “You want to go back there,” she states in horrified surprise.

He winces apologetically. “It’s not always as terrible as it was to you,” he says. “I—” he hesitates. “I love it there.”

Maddison snorts and clearly doesn’t believe him. He smiles at her sheepishly. The aunt watches them, mystified.

“I’ll see you around, kid. Be good,” he says, ruffling her hair in parting, and steps off the porch, leaving a broken family behind to heal. He thinks of his first time on the highway again, and the mother and son in the drug town, about the abject horror some families go through, and decides that he really wants to call his sister.

He sets out to the nearest wi-fi hotspot, while dialing Nancy.

“Hello?” her voice rings out, so warm and familiar.

“Hey, Nance,” he smiles.

“Neal? Oh my god, where have you been!” she shrieks. “We’ve been worried sick!”

“What do you mean where I’ve been. I told you I was going on a work trip.”

“That was a _month_ ago, and then you go off the grid, completely disappear? Mom thought you were dead, or something, what the actual fuck.”

Only it hasn’t been a month. It has been barely a week for him. But not to the highway, apparently, that just keeps punishing him and punishing him for trying to find his way back into her graces.

He’s silent for a good long while, trying to come up with a halfway sane answer.

“Neal? Are you there?”

“I was at a—retreat.” He winces at himself. “No phones, no internet, no nothing. Complete off the grid cleansing. It was—very sudden. You know I’ve been going through some stuff. I guess I didn’t think you’d be so worried.”

“No, you didn’t think,” she snaps. “Disappearing like that? That is so not you, Neal! How could we not worry?” She sighs loudly, and relents. “Are you alright now?” The worry in her trumps her anger.

“I’m great. I’m—I’m heading home, soon. This won’t happen again.”

“I gotta call mom and dad. Tell them you aren’t dead.”

“Tell ‘em I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I love you.”

“Yeah,” she sighs, but does add. “Love you too, Nealo.”

The line disconnects.

He plants himself at an internet café, dazed, and checks his inbox. His mail is flooded by messages, from Nancy, and his parents, and Lynn, all looking for him. It’s crazy. The whole Interstate is crazy, and dangerous, in ways he hasn’t considered, and he should give it a rest. It was a nice reunion, and he should be grateful to have even that.

He still has some money on him, so instead of catching a cab he walks to the nearest mall, swinging by an arts supply store squeezed in there between kitchenware and nail polish sections. It’s not even about what was in the car that got stolen—he’s got plenty of supplies back at his apartment—it’s a comfort thing. Buy something he loves to make himself feel better. He ends up leaving with a few new tubes of paint—a brand he’s been meaning to try, advertised as being soft and great for mixing new tones; plus, he’s been running low on a few colors anyway.

He exits through a different door than he entered, past the bustling food court. The sun is reflecting off the rotating glass, enough to make one’s eyes water. He’s blinded momentarily, and raises a hand to shield himself from the light.

Eyes closed, he notices a few things: the air smelling different, and the street being considerably quieter than it’s supposed to be. He opens his eyes carefully, and he doesn’t recognize where he is. Behind him is a wall. He touches it for good measure, and it’s solid concrete. He’s just standing there, with his art supplies, like an idiot.

He knows what this is without confirmation, and it adds a spring to his gait, but he still circles around the building, and finds that the concrete wall belongs to a diner, which he happily enters.

“Excuse me,” he says, leaning across the counter. “Do you mind if I ask what town is this?”

The woman behind the counter looks at him like she minds a great deal. Like he’s either punking her, or is heavily hung over to have no idea where he is, and she will have none of his BS. “Fox Point,” she answers anyway.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a map, would you?”

She gives him a real stink eye. “Can I put a map on the menu?” He shakes his head. “Then no, we don’t serve any maps here. Now, are you going to order, or cause trouble?”

“No trouble,” he promises. “I’ll have some coffee,” he says quickly, guilted into it by her stare. “Can I use your rest room?”

She heaves a loud sigh and points him to the door at the end. He nods gratefully at her and picks a table, planting his art supplies there as a claim, figuring nobody would need to steal those in a quiet diner. In the bathroom, he washes his hands and sprinkles some cold water over his face, and just stays there for a moment, staring at himself in the mirror and shaking a little.

It has let him back. For whatever reason, however it all works, but he has passed some sort of a test, and it has let him back, and it feels like coming home.

——o——

When he returns from the bathroom, Grant is sitting at his table.

Just sitting there, red bow-tie and monkey-pipe in tow, and the smoke coming out of it is normal tobacco smoke. Neal has picked the table near the window, framed by couches, not chairs. Grant is propping the wall with his back, stretching his legs across the seat of that couch. The same waitress that gave Neal a hard time looks at him sharply, but he offers her a patented charming smile, and she goes back to work without reprimanding him.

Neal just stands there, like a brick wall, afraid to breathe, afraid to have a thought. Afraid that if he blinks, Grant will disappear, like the posters, like anything else that is of the Interstate.

Someone bumps into him, and mutters uncharitably, “Do you mind?”

Neal breaks his eye contact for just a second, and mutters apologies. When he hurriedly looks back, Grant is still there, and he’s looking back, smiling dangerously. Everything he does, Neal supposes, is a little dangerous. Grant pulls out his pipe and makes an inviting gesture. Neal stumbles forward on stiff legs and slides into the seat across.

“It’s you,” he exhales. “You’re really here.”

Grant looks at him with hazel-green eyes, and a raised eyebrow, and Neal supposes that’s a really dumb thing to say.

“I hear you’ve been looking for me,” Grant says.

Neal smiles.

“Why?” Grant asks, looking away and observing the diner with curious eyes. Like he’s looking for the next mark. He doesn’t seem particularly thrilled by this reunion. “You got your wish. Our contract is null,” he says dully.

“My—?” Neal sputters, because that’s what he thinks this is? A wish thing? Neal never knew he wished for anything in the first place. He just picked up a hitchhiker and had the time of his life.

Grant looks at him and asks again, “What do you want, Neal?” His eyes are eagle-sharp.

And Neal realizes he has no idea, there isn’t anything reasonable about wanting to see Grant. He has been looking for the Interstate, mostly. Grant is just the most honest thing he has carried home from here. He is the Interstate, or one of its rulers, or one of it’s rules.

“You know, technically, I never got my wish I don’t think,” he says. Curing him of a worrying need to have answers isn’t the same as granting him the answer.

Grant frowns and looks at him with a _what are you talking about, of course, you did_ expression. “You got an eight-ball.”

“I broke your eight-ball,” Neal scoffs.

“Aw. It was lovingly made,” Grant’s mouth turns downward solemnly.

“A lovingly made mind-fuck,” Neal says, but he’s smiling.

Grant laughs and shrugs a _You got me there_.

“No, it was great, I really appreciated it,” Neal says, because he’s not exactly ungrateful about it either. “But I finally figured out how to make my own decisions.”

Grant smirks. “Still. Shame about the eight-ball. You didn’t have to ask him things. He’s just a good conversationalist.”

Neal narrows his eyes and wonders if he’s bullshitting him again. With Grant it’s best to err on the side of caution. He wonders if there’s some sort of a tell, to know when he’s joking and when he’s serious.

“You wanna wish for another eight-ball?”

Neal snorts. “I’m pretty sure that’s just giving you a chance to fuck me over.” Grant laughs, and Neal smiles. “I don’t want anything,” he says. “We just had fun the first time around. I missed having a friendly face, and I apparently misjudged how unreachable you are.”

Grant studies him thoughtfully, rubbing his fingers over his smile, then gets up from the table. “Give me a lift?” he asks.

“I don’t have a car,” Neal says warily, thinking that this is something Grant, omniscient as he is, should probably know about his situation already.

Grant arches an eyebrow. “Nonsense,” he says and heads for the door.

Neal follows him outside, and there it is. His cobalt-blue car, same plate number, and when he looks inside, the painting of the highway sits on the back seat, untouched, along with his art supplies.

“I like it,” Grant smiles.

“How?” Neal breathes out.

Grant dares to look innocent. “Pardon me?”

“It got stolen.”

“Seems it found its way back to you,” he shrugs, and climbs inside. “I’m sure it got stories to tell.”

Neal freezes with his hand on the driver’s door and looks at Grant, and at the car, remembering that odd encounter at a gas station. He wonders if there is a way to ask the thing he wants without complete assholery: ask if he’s been spying on Neal.

“Something wrong?” Grant asks guiltlessly from inside.

Neal shelves it for another time, shaking his head, and gets in. Everything is just as he left it, undisturbed. Even the card is still sticking out from the visor. He traces it with a near fondness, then realizes that Grant is aware of what it is and might find it strange and abruptly takes his hand back.

“So what should I call you?” he asks eventually.

It’s not the first thing he asks.

The first thing he asks is, “Where to?” and Grant gives an eloquent shrug and says, “Just forward. The Interstate will get us where we need to go.”

Neal soaks it in, pulse racing, and it’s this kind of honesty he’s been missing. Not just deference to what this highway is, but the sure knowledge of its inner cartography that comes with O.W. Grant.

Which is when he asks.

“O-Double-U? That’s a bit of a mouthful. Or do you go by Mr. Conrad?” he starts counting them all. “Oscar Warren James? Or, how about: Robin Fields?”

He says the last one reproachfully, throwing a pointed glare in his direction, because he had the gall to sit there and listen to Neal humiliate himself by waxing poetics about ‘Robin Fields’ the girl from the posters, and how she’s the woman he’s gonna marry. ‘Cause that’s not mortifying in hindsight.

O.W. laughs, like he can read Neal’s mind, or maybe at the entire situation. “You can call me Grant,” he says. “Many do. You did. Why change it?”

Neal looks at him. “That’s not a name. That’s a verb. That’s your job description.”

Grant laughs. “Tell that to all the Carters, and Hunters, and Masons.” Neal gives him another look and Grant relents, if only ever so slightly. “I don’t have a real name. Nobody ever gave me one. So I collect them. Some nicknames stick, and I like this one.”

Neal wonders how the hell a man can have no name—except, of course, this is no man he’s talking to here. It should probably concern him more, but he’s more preoccupied with all the questions bursting out of him. He should have compiled a list.

——o——

“Stop here,” Grant says eventually. “This is my cue.”

They are in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but woods stretching out to both sides of them. Neal doesn’t question it.

“Do you have a—thing here? A wish?”

Grant looks at him, his expression amused and utterly inscrutable, and Neal knows he will get no answer. Not to this question, not today.

“You can’t just—I have so many things I want to talk to you about,” he says, and tries not to sound desperate.

Only, the last time Grant ditched him Neal ended up in a city of junkies, then nearly blown up, then in jail, then nearly dead. He doesn’t regret a thing about it, wouldn’t trade the traps of this beautiful highway for anything—but he doesn’t want to stumble through it, he wants to navigate, and he wants to hear it from the source. He wants to ask so many things.

Grant laughs and gets out of the car. “Neal Oliver. Always wanting an answer. Didn’t you say I cured you of it?”

Neal shrugs. “Of my fear of them, yes. Not curiosity.” He locks eyes with Grant.

He smiles thinly. “Drive ahead to the nearest town,” he says, patting the hood of the car. “And Neal? Don’t try the waffles. Bad badge of milk. Wouldn’t want to drive in a car with you after that.”

Which is as much of a _See you soon_ as Neal can expect, but it makes him feel marginally better. Grant bites down on his pipe (it smells of juniper) and winks at Neal—or does one of his approximations of a wink, which, in his case, manages to contain all human expressions folded into one. Neal has seen it as a tip of a hat, and recognition, and satisfaction, and a smirk, and flirtation, and an apologetic I-told-you-so. This one seems to say: _Chin up_.

Neal slowly steps on the gas and the car crawls away. It feels a little bit exactly like when he was escorting Maddison out, only worse. In the rearview mirror he sees Grant standing in the middle of the road, watching him, before turning and heading for the woods.

——o——

The next town over is called Gentleman River, and Neal spends most of the time pondering why exactly their particular river was so gentlemanly, or, maybe, what a gentleman did that was river-related to warrant this name. He doesn’t ask and avoids the waffles, and other dairy-related products when offered.

Grant doesn’t come. By nightfall, Neal has no choice but to rent a little room, and he thinks he’ll stay up and wait some more, but he crashes the minute he’s out of the shower, exhaustion hitting him like a shovel.

Come morning, his expectations are miserably low. But when he leaves the motel, all ready with nowhere to go, Grant is leaning against the hood of Neal’s car, eyes closed and letting the wind blow across his face, looking perfectly serene. He stirs, hearing the door, and looks at Neal.

“Morning,” he says jovially, raising his pipe.

“Hi,” Neal offers gracelessly. “You’re here.”

“I keep my word,” Grant gives him a look, like Neal didn’t need to worry.

_To an extent,_ Neal wants to say, but, more to the point, he says, “You didn’t give me any kind of a word.”

“It was implied,” Grant says, sliding into his seat in the car.

Neal fiddles with his keys. “This isn’t a wish thing,” he says again, just standing there, not getting into the car just yet. He’s been very careful with what he says, but it’s not like Grant is above pulling one over you for a punch line.

Grant extracts the pipe from his mouth, and his eyes grow serious. “You think I mistook it for one?”

Neal shrugs with one shoulder. “Just checking,” he says. _If you’re fucking with me again,_ goes unsaid and implicitly understood. Grant hides an unremorseful smirk around his pipe again.

Sighing, Neal takes his place at the driver’s seat and starts the car. Questions crowd the tip of his tongue, cram his throat, but he swallows them back patiently. Grant throws him an amused, undeceived stare. “_Yes,_ Neal?” he prompts.

“That thing you said. About the car having stories.” It’s been on his mind since yesterday. There’s a larger question there.

“Yes?”

“Someone else said to me the same exact thing, word for word. Someone who could see the weird also.”

“Interesting,” Grant says, his face guileless. “So what’s your question?”

“Do you know _everything_ about me? Every second of my life?” He doesn’t mean for it to come out accusing, but it does.

“Where would be the fun in that?” Grant scoffs. “I know enough for the Interstate to play to your strengths. _And_ weaknesses.”

Neal bites on his lip, and thinks back to his first trip, with Laura of the Perfect Fuck, and the drug town, and the lawyer town, and Mr. Cody, and the mystery killer.

“You know about my dad,” he says. “About the law school, and the art school, and Lynn, and my insecurities, and the things I’m afraid of. That’s—that’s a lot to know. Seems a bit unfair.”

Grant laughs openly at that, and Neal realizes too late that no it isn’t. Grant gets to know these things because Neal was his _‘mark’_. It’s Neal who imagined them as anything equal. Grant has no obligation to humor him.

“So ask me then,” Grant humors him anyway. “I’m an open book.”

Neal grips the steering wheel, startled. “Okay,” he considers carefully. “Who are you? Are you a—” he tries to come up with a word, and comes up short. _Demon_ seems way off the mark, and so does _spirit_, or _faery_. “You’re not human, are you?” he just asks. “So how did that even happen?”

Grant snorts loudly. “Lack of condoms at the rez,” he says.

“A—what?”

Grant looks at him, amused. “I had parents, Neal,” he says. “Did you think I was created out of Zeus’s headache?”

“I—um. Sorry?” Neal offers, embarrassed. Then adds, “Is this true, or are you just trying to make me feel bad?”

Grant laughs. “Both,” he concedes, and sounds satisfied—whether with himself or with Neal for knowing it, he isn’t sure. “Let’s see. I take after my father in coloring. He was an Irishman.” He stops, catching himself, and amends, “Well. He was a leprechaun. Came over here with all the immigrants.”

He looks at Neal then, eyes keen and bright. “Hence the wish-granting,” Neal says slowly, and Grant chuckles, and shakes his head. Like maybe he expected Neal to be freaked out more.

“Hence,” he agrees.

“And your mother?”

“Take after her only in height,” Grant says. “A crying shame, too. They didn’t really love that I looked nothing like them. I mean, there’s passing, and then there’s me. Guess it was always in my nature to be a pretender.” His smirk grows sharper. He looks up at Neal and elaborates. “You people call us the Cheyenne.”

Neal’s eyebrows crawl up in spite of himself. Grant is right. Irish? He can see it clearly. But nothing Native. Grant smiles and shrugs a _‘no big deal’_ kind of a shrug, but it comes off a little tense.

Neal wants to ask how it worked out for him, be he knows better than to press. “What do you mean ‘us people’?” he asks instead.

“Oh, you know that most of the tribal names are just words Europeans picked and assigned at random. As they are wont to do,” he says sarcastically. “Cheyenne is what the Sioux called us. It meant that we talked funny. We called ourselves _Tsitsistas_, in the times before.” He smiles at Neal, and lets him ask.

“And that means?”

The smiles grows wider, wickeder. “_Beautiful people,_” he says, as he leans elegantly back in his seat. “Fits nicely, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Um,” Neal says in a brilliant display of eloquence, and flushes red.

He’s used to this from Grant, too, funnily enough: the occasional unobliging come-on. They’ve had weirder conversations, the first time around. The guy is compulsive about tripping Neal up at every turn. And anyway, it’s stupid, he’s a fucking art student. He drew nudes, analyzed antique sculptures, he’s no stranger to judging human aesthetic. Apparently it’s just easier with oil and marble, or when the recipient isn’t staring at you in a way that has nothing to do with aesthetics.

Neal trains his eyes on the road, and manages to unglue his tongue from his palate to mumble, “Sure,” and knows Grant will let it go, and he does with a light laugh.

“My turn,” he demands, and this isn’t how it was supposed to work, Grant already knew too much, and Neal too little, that was the whole point—but in this moment, being saved from himself, Neal is grateful for an abrupt change of topic.

Grant looks at him, all playfulness gone, and asks, “What happened with Lynn?”

Neal grips the wheel tighter, and keeps his eyes resolutely forward, and he really doesn’t want to talk about it. Doesn’t want to end up sounding antagonistic, or accusing, or ungrateful. He takes his time, phrasing it as neutral as possible, and Grant waits on him patiently.

“You said to look,” he says in the end. “To think; to expect the mind-fuck. And she was.”

He glances at Grant peripherally, still not turning his head. He doesn’t move, doesn’t offer any protestation. A small part of Neal was hoping he’d object, somehow. He swallows.

“What happened?” Grant asks again. Like he doesn’t know exactly.

“You gave her the blue pill,” Neal says. “But not me.”

Grant hums thoughtfully. “No. Not you,” he agrees.

“So. Then. Why even ask? You knew this would happen.”

Grant frowns at him. “Oh, I didn’t know. You could have chosen differently.”

“Yeah, and shouldn’t I have?” Neal asks. “She wished for a perfect guy. Wouldn’t the perfect guy choose her and stay?”

“I don’t know, would he?” Grant echoes. “Would he be that perfect then, if he knew what he knew, and stayed?” Grant’s smile is rueful but unrepentant. Neal closes his eyes. This is so like him, this ironic stalemate.

“Not a big fan of happy endings, are you?” he mutters, gripping the steering wheel tighter. He doesn’t mean to be this aggravated about this, he isn’t _angry_ about Lynn, he doesn’t want to blame Grant, it’s just— “She deserved to get what she wished for. To get a happy ending. Someone should, once in a while, you know.”

“She wished to meet a perfect guy that would check all her boxes,” Grant says. “She did. Nowhere did it state he would be her romantic soulmate.”

Neal shakes his head. “You keep doing that. Finding loopholes. She’s a good person. She deserved it. She deserved to remember.”

Grant snorts. “No. You think _you_ deserve for her to remember. I made her spend a year in jail. You think she deserves to remember that? She lived out her princess fantasy, and met a good guy, and I ensured he was good and right for her. By all accounts, that’s quite a happy ending. What I cannot ensure is whether or not you fall in love. That’s all on you. It seemed like you would, and that made me happy. I told you: I’m a fan of my own work. So I asked.”

Neal shakes his head. “How could you possibly imagine we’d work out?”

“You could if you wanted what you want now a little less,” Grant says with a wry smile. “That’s not a reprimand. I just didn’t anticipate how much you’d fall in love with the Interstate.”

Neal harrumphs, and can’t help but think about his theory about having reactionary girlfriends. Rona, his first girlfriend from art school, who understood him perfectly, but had opinions, so many _opinions_ about his art that she drove him crazy. Followed by Sally who preferred not to have opinions, about Neal’s art, nor his interests, nor his life, nor, really, well, Neal. Sally who was smart and right about many things but wasn’t right for him. And then Lynn, who was completely right for him as a person, only she didn’t remember anything. He wonders sourly what the next whiplash is gonna look like.

They pass another signpost, the _60_ written in bright white across the blue shield. Grant nods towards it and says, “I can’t fault you for running after her. The Interstate makes for a perfectly lovely companion.”

“Can’t really date a highway,” Neal says sarcastically, because he is done talking about this mopey thing. “At least I hope you can’t,” he adds.

Grant laughs quietly. “Sex is overrated,” he says.

“Uh-huh. I remember,” Neal says wryly. “Your… accident.” He tries and fails not to glance over Grant’s crotch, and makes himself not wonder where the truth of that particular mind-fuck ended and began.

Grant is looking outside his window and couldn’t possibly have seen anything, and Neal quickly averts his eyes back to the road. Grant curls his mouth into a smirk that is _audible_ in his voice when he murmurs:

“It’s impolite to stare.”

——o——

Past the town of Deepville, in a place called, embarrassingly enough, Deeperstill, sitting at a diner, they meet Velvet Price. It is completely unsurprising and painfully predictable that parents who would pick a name like ‘Velvet’ wouldn’t really raise a genius.

Grant loves diners. Loves any stops they make, because he can keep a lookout for self-important fools. They’ve taught an arrogant banker a lesson in one of these towns, and screwed with a couple of people, much like they screwed over Miss Perfect Fuck—but that’s just a mean streak, nothing special. This kind of mind-fuckery and karmic justice is something Neal could do on his human own, just by being a bit of a smartass. Deeperstill is where it all changes.

“Is the next one gonna be called Deeperdeeperyet?” Neal asks, twisting his mouth.

“Shh,” Grant stops him, raising a finger. “Listen.”

Neal turns around and follows Grant’s eyes, focused on the three girls sitting at the next table. They seem to be Neal’s age, so at this point some higher brain function is expected.

One of them, (Velvet, as becomes apparent from the conversation,) is haranguing the others about having higher standards in men.

Grant leans over to Neal, places a hand on his shoulder blades and says under his breath, “She’s just jealous. She thought that by this point she’d already have some dating experience under her belt. That didn’t really happen, so now in her mind it’s a race: she wants to get a boyfriend before her friends do, and secure herself as more romantically desirable and successful than them. Considering her personality, that’s not gonna happen.”

“We cannot settle, ladies,” Velvet is saying. “We should wish for more for ourselves.” It would sound more empowering if she wasn’t delivering it like a sermon to arrogance.

“This should be good,” Grant murmurs, and hides a smile into his knuckles.

“I wish,” (and Neal can’t help but wince as she says it and steals a glance at Grant. Grant looks like a hound on a trail, positively delighted,) “to meet a guy who is strong. A guy who’s talented in at least one thing. A guy who’s smart. A guy who’s handsome.”

Her friends smile politely, because who wouldn’t want that, but also, in a town as small as Deeperstill, you have to have a certain cap on your expectations. Neal just keeps wincing at each sentence coming out of her mouth. He throws another careful glance at Grant, and his pipe is back in his mouth, the monkey’s eyes glowing green, hidden underneath his palm. There’s a faint scent of lovage and mugwort in the air.

“Done,” he says sweetly.

Neal rubs his palm over his mouth nervously. “What did you do?” he asks. “You didn’t just create some weird Frankenstein’s amalgam, did you?”

Grant only smiles wickedly at him. Neal is both exited and terrified, and he’s surprised at himself for the part that’s excited, but there it is. He knows this isn’t gonna end well.

They wait for about fifteen minutes, before the door opens with an insistent jangle of the bell, and a guy stumbles inside, looking harried. He looks about himself in a daze and brightens upon seeing Velvet. He isn’t much of a looker or an athlete though, and Neal watches silently, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Velvet,” he says, out of breath, stumbling towards their table. “Hi.”

“What. The hell,” she answers, the picture of pleasantness. There’s a slight twitch to Grant’s face, the briefest sign of dislike, but he steeples his fingers and observes.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but this just couldn’t wait. I was—wondering—if you would—go out with me,” he stammers out.

The girls stare at him, then at each other, and Velvet flushes crimson. “Ew. Owen. What?” she says.

The door rings again, letting inside another guy. This one looks like he’s been hitting the gym a lot.

“Velvet,” he says happily, waltzing up to the table and ignoring everyone else. “I’ve got these tickets to a football game on Friday. Would you be my plus one?”

“Is this a joke?” she asks. “Did you guys just lose Truth or Dare or something, and I’m the asshole?”

“What?” the new guy asks, completely guileless, and she catches that. Her face turns from contempt to interest.

“Owen just asked me out,” she says.

The new guy looks at Owen like he hasn’t even noticed him until this point. “Why don’t you back off to wherever library you crawled out of? You wouldn’t know how to treat a lady right anyway.”

The doorbell jingles again, and Neal hides his face in his palms and groans, seeing where this is heading. She wished for four distinct things, and they’re all coming. Grant laughs at his discomfort.

In ten minutes, the table is crowded by a total of four guys. Velvet’s two girlfriends look distinctly distressed by the entire scenario. One of them looks ready to cry. The guys, by this point, aren’t that preoccupied with Velvet, as they have devolved into chest-pounding machismo. Two more minutes, and it’s a four-way fistfight for the right to take her to dinner. She makes her escape while they fight, but Neal can see her expression, and she’s beaming. This is exactly the kind of ridiculous drama she wanted to center around herself.

“So what was the point?” Neal asks, as they walk out of the diner. “You made everybody miserable except for the vapid Mean Girl.”

They leave the money on the counter, while the staff is too busy breaking up the fight, and leave the testosterone-filled establishment.

Grant snorts with a slight chiding frown. “Big picture, Neal. She’s flattered now. She won’t be in a few days.”

“I thought you couldn’t ensure that people fall in love,” Neal says.

“I didn’t,” Grant says. “They’re not. But, crushes happen, and they all just got one. It will be out of their system in a week or two. Chances have it, one of them will discover that her shy friend is an amazing person, realizing Miss Price’s nightmare of not being the first to get a boyfriend. Another one will finally face the reality that girls are just not for him. It will work out all around.”

“And her?”

“She might learn a valuable lesson from it all. Or she might not. I’m all for character development. People just tend to not surprise me in all the worst ways.”

He gives Neal a pointed glance, and Neal wonders uncomfortably if he’s just another guy who lived down to the worst expectations of him. He hopes he’s done better than that.

——o——

They stay in Deeperstill for a few days, observing the fallout, proving Grant right on every account before moving on. It starts a new routine for them, this journey across the part of America that exists in the cracks of reality, and the longer it goes on, the longer Grant is there every day without mysteriously disappearing, the more Neal wonders when this vacation’s gonna finally bore him, and the adventure will end.

“Can I ask you a question?” Neal asks (nearly every day; it’s sort of a ritual.)

“Yes, Neal,” Grant answers, (sometimes grudgingly resigned, sometimes amused, sometimes sly.)

“Do you actually have any powers?”

“How do you mean?” Grant raises an eyebrow.

“I mean... It occurs to me that none of the wishes you pretend to fulfill actually come true. You just mess with people. You do small-time stuff. You have that air about you, like you can do things, but... can you? You gave me an eight-ball for Chrissake.”

“Oh, you and that eight-ball,” Grant rolls his eyes. “What did you expect, an oracle?”

Neal gives him a stare that means that he won’t be distracted. “Can you actually do anything?” he asks point blank.

Grant stops and looks at him. “I can. Nearly everything.”

The way he says it, quiet and unsmiling and with something ancient hidden behind his eyes, sends shivers down Neal’s spine.

“Stop time?” he asks.

Grant nods. “And reverse it, too, and bend it every which way. How do you think you ended up spending a week here, and woke up in the hospital the same day you got admitted?”

Or spent a week here, and walked out only to find out a month has passed on the outside. He doesn’t bring it up.

“Raise people from the dead?”

“It’s been known to happen. Never led to anything good.”

“And love?”

“I try not to mess with that, but yeah.”

“Not the garbage crushes you’ve done before.”

“No,” he says solemnly. “For real. But that’s too much interference. I enjoy seeing what people do when they’re them. Mess with them too much and they are suddenly what you made them into instead.”

“And do you ever actually do the wish? Has anyone gotten from you what they wanted?”

“The thing about wishes,” Grant says slowly, “is that they’re a contract. I can choose not to accept it, and I can choose to work within the parameters of it, but I cannot play god and change the letter of it. Wishes go bad, because people make bad wishes. They don’t know what they want and wish for things they shouldn’t. Then it comes to bite them in the ass.” He looks at Neal. “Case in point. You wished for an answer. But that’s not what you wanted. You wanted things easy. You wanted not to make hard choices.”

“I guess I did, at that,” Neal whispers.

Grant shrugs, point made, and bites around his pipe again. They ride in silence for a while, before Grant speaks again without looking at him.

“You know, most people just go home, carry their epiphanies with them.”

“Highway experiences. I remember.”

“Quite. Most are grateful for the chance to be saved from their own stupidity. For their eyes to be opened.”

“Gee, thanks,” Neal mutters, squeezing the wheel tighter.

“What I’m saying is, people don’t usually go back for seconds. But you did,” Grant looks at him and doesn’t ask the question. It hangs in the air anyway.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Neal shrugs. That’s a lie, he knows exactly, but he doesn’t know how to talk about what this Interstate means to him without sounding like he’s sucking up to the very master of it all. So instead he smiles an easy smile, keeping his eyes on the road, and says, “Maybe I’m not as smart as you give me credit for.”

——o——

In a town called Cardinal Heights, they spend four Wednesdays in a row groundhog-daying a man who wished that day never happened. The first time it happens, Grant smirks and bites down harder on his pipe, and suddenly Neal is opening his eyes in his motel room, bright and early, only this time Grant is striding through the door immediately instead of waiting outside like he usually does, and saying:

“Well, let’s see if this today will be any better.”

In the middle of take two Neal remembers that he’s been texting back and forth with Nancy yesterday, or, well, the previous today, semantics is really tripping him up here. Checking his phone, he finds the messages all still there. It’s 13:01 on the clock. The last message he sent yesterday was from 15:20. _Thinking of you,_ he types warily and hits sent. It appears right underneath the text chain, and the timer says 13:01.

Grant watches him fiddle with his phone and puts a delicate hand on the small of his back. “Best not think too hard on it,” he says. “But you’re not the intended recipient of this time shift, I wouldn’t erase your day.”

“But—how?” Neal asks helplessly, waving his phone.

“How else,” Grant smiles. “Magic.”

The second reset happens just like the first one. “Get ready,” Grant says, and in a blink of an eye it’s morning again, he’s in his motel again, and he’s not even tired. (Him and Nancy continue texting. It’s still Wednesday, somehow.)

The third, and last time, Neal places a hand on Grant’s shoulder and asks, “Show me how.”

Grant considers him for a long moment, then offers him his hand. “Hold on tight,” he says. And then Neal sees the day _move_. Like a rewind backwards around them, but also not—there are flashes of this day that didn’t happen, potential permutations, the roads not taken. Neal is only catching glimpses there is so much to see, it’s the entirety of today that could have happened in all its endless variations.

“You okay?” Grant asks him. They’re in his motel room again, and the world is spinning a little, shining at the edges. He sits down, and Grant lets go off his hand and regards him kindly. “This is not for everyone,” he says softly.

“I’m fine,” Neal says, catching his breath. “I’m great. I’m—thank you.”

Grant cocks his head to the side and looks at him oddly. And then their Wednesday begins again.

——o——

Afterwards, when it’s finally the nascent hours of Thursday, he still cannot sleep. His skin feels alive with magic. He gives up eventually, throws his blanket open and gets up, paces the room for a few. He’s thinking of breaking out his art tools and sketching to calm the nerves, when something catches his eye through the window. When he looks out, Grant is still there, he hasn’t disappeared to wherever it is he goes to when he’s not with Neal. He’s leaning against Neal’s car; his eyes are closed; full moon is like a bright eye over his head.

Neal puts on his jeans and shirt and steps into his shoes and goes outside, as quiet as possible, so as not to disturb the night. Grant is half-sitting on the hood of the car with that curious expression he gets sometimes, like he’s listening to the trees, or the wind, and they’re telling him secrets. Like he can hear every wish being carried to him.

Neal tentatively walks over to him, and Grant doesn’t really acknowledge his presence, but when Neal stops right by him, he slides over, clearing a space for him to sit down. For a minute, they enjoy the night together. Neal shivers: he has misjudged the weather, but going back inside doesn’t feel like an option—it would disrupt the moment.

“Can I ask you a question?” Neal asks quietly.

Grant’s still not opening his eyes, but he smiles. “Yes, Neal.”

The thing he really should ask, the thing on the tip of his tongue is why Grant is still here. Not tonight, but with Neal, in general. How long this is gonna last. What this even is. It’s a tight knot in the pit of Neal’s stomach these days—that he doesn’t know where they stand. What the rules of their grand adventure are. He isn’t sure Grant would tell him, and, truth be told, Neal is afraid of the answer anyway.

“How come it’s called the Interstate, if it’s everywhere?” he asks instead, and watches Grant’s smile deepen. “Come to think of it, how can it even be everywhere? Is there any place the road ends?”

Grant laughs and finally opens his eyes to look at him. “That’s a big one. Isn’t that what everybody wants to know? What’s at the end of the road?”

“Yeah, well, they usually mean the afterlife.”

“You’re assuming there’s a difference,” Grant arches an eyebrow at him challengingly, and Neal returns the gesture—he isn’t easily misled these days.

Grant squints and drops his eyes. His gaze travels, falls on Neal’s bare arms. He looks away, frustrated. It occurs to Neal that Grant is used to spinning lies—and as much as he enjoys the fact that Neal is sharp and sees through his bullshit, there has to be a part of him that dislikes it, too, because it prevents him from avoiding difficult questions.

In the ensuing silence, Grant shrugs off his jacket and throws it over Neal’s shoulders. “You’ll catch your death,” he says, and Neal shivers again, and this time the cold has nothing to do with it. Words are powerful things on the Interstate, and Grant is never not careful with what he says.

Without his jacket, Grant looks startlingly casual, way too human—except for the fact that he doesn’t appear to be feeling the cold. He rolls up his sleeves, his mind far away, and Neal stares at his forearms stupidly, like he wasn’t aware they were there. Everything about this scene seems to belong to the night world, but not the real world, every word spoken, every gesture made.

“What do you think is at the end?” Grant breaks the silence, turns the question back on him.

“Hm?” Neal looks up, distracted. “Oh. I don’t know. A rainbow and a pot of gold? Heaven? Hell? The Library of Alexandria? A labyrinth? Something incredibly ironic, I bet.”

Grant laughs and nods. He likes Neal’s mind, of that much Neal is certain. He smiles back.

“You’re an art student, Neal,” he says. “You know Escher.”

“Of course.”

“That’s how it is. None-euclidian. That’s how you got here, that’s how you left. You drove past a door, and made a U-turn, and suddenly a door was made available. That’s how our friend Tolbert can eat so much. That’s how I can twist time, and be everywhere all at once. Everything converges with everything on the Interstate.”

Neal has to think about that one. It makes his head hurt only slightly less than trying to imagine the endless infinity of the universe. He looks up to the stars again.

“So, have you ever met yourself, then?” he asks.

“No. I’m pretty singular,” Grant’s smile is easy and amused.

“Have you met me? Other versions of me?”

“That would be telling.”

But Neal knows of at least one version of him that must have been on the Interstate. “You know. I’m still sorting through my first trip here. But.”

“Yes, Neal?”

Neal angles himself and reaches through the window of the car, pulling out the card left to him by Ray, the seven of red spades. He flicks his finger against it.

“The killer. Was it me? Was I it the whole time?”

“Yes,” Grant shrugs smoothly. “You killed yourself. That version of you died when you made all the right choices—or all the wrong ones, what do I know?”

“Yeah, that would be telling,” Neal snorts, and that’s not really any kind of an answer. But Grant is smiling at him, and Neal doesn’t worry. They might not have been the perfect choices, or the only choices, but they were decidedly not bad. And they all led him here.

They stay silent for a while, just watching the night together.

“Is the night sky here the same sky as everywhere else?” Neal asks.

“We are still on the same planet, Neal,” Grant says, like that should be obvious.

“I guess that’s true,” he concedes. “You know, the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, is pretty ordinary, as far as sky objects are concerned. Many stars, even in its own constellation, shine much brighter than it, but Sirius is closer to us, so everything else appears fainter. But among those faint objects, some are billion light-years away, which means they are so bright they outshine everything around them. They’re actually blinding. They probably drown out nearby stars. That’s how I think of the Interstate. It drowns everything out.”

When he looks up at Grant, his expression’s unreadable, nearly melancholy.

“I should go,” he says quietly, and gets up. Neal stumbles upwards after him and shrugs off his jacket to give it back. Their fingers touch, and he must have been way colder than he knew, because Grant’s hand is strikingly hot, like he himself is made out of starlight.

Why did you stay this long, Neal still wants to ask. How long are you going to be around?

“Good-night,” he says instead, heart hammering in his chest.

Grant slides into his jacket and rights his red bow-tie. He lingers for a moment, looking at Neal, like he wants to say something else. Like he wants something else. But in the end he just nods, a curt little gesture. Then he raises his hand, like he’s lifting a curtain, and the air seems to shimmer and bend. Neal doesn’t catch a glimpse of what is on the other side as Grant just slips through the air, through that curtain he’s made for himself, and he’s just gone.

——o——

Neal has this dream a few times—a nightmare, really, and something he’s been thinking about when awake, not that in his dream he remembers—that he wakes up in the same hospital he woke up the first time around, it’s still Tuesday the 18th, and none of this has been real.

——o——

The one thing Neal forgets while travelling with Grant is how the Interstate is a dangerous place. Being with Grant, he just feels safe, protected from outbursts of irrationality, human or otherwise. But he’s met the police tyranny and drug-haze of Banton, and the lawyer-prison town of Morlaw, and seen Mr. Cody’s bomb vest, and been in a high-speed chase evading his own self. The Interstate can be kind, but it can be the very opposite of it, too. Which is all to say, a few miles south of a town called Desert Cliffs Neal meets Sid and Billy: a veritable Romeo and Juliet pair, in love against all odds, off on their teenage adventure.

Caveat: they’ve made a suicide pact. They’re holed up in their favorite romantic spot. And the boy brought a gun.

Neal honestly thinks, at first, that he’s holding the girl hostage. In a way, maybe he is, but the gun is as much a measure of control as it is a way of keeping others at bay. Which Neal discovers when he tries to approach the situation. The gun and the threat of violence also doesn’t stop the two of them from passionately making out, while brandishing said gun aimlessly.

“Aren’t you gonna do anything about that?” Neal hisses at Grant, who’s watching the entire situation with a sort of detached curiosity.

“Why?” he says impassively. “It’s their choices. Nobody has wished for anything here.”

“Oh, that’s such bullshit,” Neal says, with more vehemence than he meant to. Grant only seems more amused at that.

“Unless _you_ want to wish for it,” he suggests.

Neal just makes a face at him. He knows a challenge when he sees one, especially from Grant, always trying to get a rise out of him.

He turns determinedly to the kids. The boy and the girl have chosen this spot for their great romantic statement: if their parents won’t let them be together, then this is the hill they die on. Literally. There’s only one cop here, trying desperately to not let it escalate, one way or another. He doesn’t particularly object when Neal asks to try and talk them down—at this point, with no backup, he’s willing to try anything.

Neal looks back on Grant and raises his eyebrows challengingly. _I’m going_, he means to say. _You sure you won’t step in?_ Grant just lifts his pipe at him in a, _Well, go on then, _gesture. At this point, it’s a game of chicken. Neal snorts, and looks back at the duo.

“You know, in my day kids would just superglue themselves to one another to be together,” he calls out to them, as he starts his slow approach. He doesn’t really have a plan, he just knows that the Interstate always provides a way.

“We tried that,” the girl tells him seriously. “Turns out, that’s nothing warm water and soap can’t solve.”

“But a gun solves everything,” he says flatly, eyeing the weapon in her boyfriend’s hand. He doesn’t look like he knows how to use it—he’s just waving it around like a knife, like a look-what-I’ve-got tactic. The cop behind Neal is sweating profusely at each careless wave of the boy’s hand.

“We don’t want to live without one another,” the girl replies with innocent conviction.

“Well,” Neal sighs, “wouldn’t you rather be alive and come up with new plans to thwart your parents? Wouldn’t you rather be here to see them proved wrong? Rub it in their faces?”

The girl looks like she honestly hasn’t considered it. Like she thought there’s some coming back from death, or something. Jesus, but they both are just dumb kids with no concept of anything real.

“Hey, screw off, buddy,” the boyfriend yells, sensing hesitation in his star-crossed lover.

“Oh, give it to me, Sidney,” the girl says, reaching for his gun.

“Careful there!” Neal says, startling forward, and the cop yells something indistinguishable behind him, and the girl pulls on her boyfriend’s arm, and he pulls away, or somebody pulls something, and the sound the gun makes–is–deafening.

His chest feels like a boulder has connected with it at full speed, and a sharp piercing sensation of an explosion. He’s knocked back by the impact, and his head connects with the ground with a worrying thud. His whole world throbs. He wonders, ridiculously, if this time around he does get a concussion—the explosion in his chest doesn’t feel real, his chest doesn’t feel real. There was a supervillain in one of the comic books he read as a child called Whiteout, who could erase reality. The writers used it literally, as an artistic tool, erasing parts of buildings, or even the hero’s own body, like with an eraser. It was never properly or logically explained how he continued functioning without major organs, but that’s how Neal feels right now, like someone has taken an eraser to his chest, and he feels his head and shoulders, and he feels himself from waist down, but his chest is somewhere else, he can’t comprehend what’s happening there at all. Breathing is something that either occurs by instinct, or maybe isn’t occurring at all.

Voices float somewhere on the periphery of his understanding. He himself is floating, sinking underneath the surface of whatever ocean is enveloping him. He thinks, for a moment, that he might be seeing a tunnel. But the tunnel curves, and passes through his jaws, and turns counterclockwise at the lightning bolt, and Neal knows, suddenly, that he’s seeing the Interstate, maybe for the first time, like she really is, and she’s unknowable and beautiful, and she’s got him, and he’s gonna be okay.

——o——

He doesn’t know where he wakes up. In one word, a mansion, but he has no idea where, or why, or how. He’s still dressed in his clothes, curiously untorn. He shoves a hand underneath his shirt, and his body is fine. He remembers getting shot, but there’s no wound. He remembers Grant’s joke about an afterlife and briefly wonders if he’s dead, and if there’s such a thing as being dead on this highway anyway.

He gets out of the bed, puts on his shoes and exits the room. Outside is a vast hallway that leads him into a grand living-room, and what he notices, the only thing he notices, is that everywhere there’s art.

It isn’t anything outrageous and louvresque, it isn’t the _The Starry Night_ greeting him. Most of the canvases are small, and the paintings feel personal. There’s a pink-splattered Monet that for all his education Neal has no knowledge of, recognizes him purely by brushstrokes. A painting of a man looking over a foggy cliff with a sense of a journey yet ahead. A woman riding through the forest on a horse in cut-up ribbons, like a collage. A landscape that feels like Klimt—there are no placards for him to find out any names.

There’s one painting that Neal stops in front of. A knight kneeling in front of his lady. She looks a little bit like Lynn. He swallows, and it finally hits him, the parallel, and the thread of a revelation that follows after—

“Up and about, I see,” Grant says behind him.

Neal turns around. Grant is leaning against the railing. He’s out of his jacket again, and his red bow tie is unspooled around his neck, like a trail of blood. Neal presses a hand to his chest again, reflexively.

“Am I misremembering it, or did you let me get shot?”

“Did I?” Grant arches an eyebrow. “You seem rather fine.”

“Why didn’t you step in?”

“You seemed to have it well in hand. And this way you got to feel a little bit immortal. How was that, by the way?”

Neal shrugs. The question’s rhetorical anyway. He looks at the painting again.

“It’s called _The End of the Quest_,” Grant says quietly, coming to stand by his side, their shoulders nearly touching.

Neal swallows. “I somehow figured.” He looks at Grant as if seeing him for the first time. “Can I ask you a question?”

Grant looks at him with a faint smile. “Yes, Neal?”

“You were married.”

“Oh, you wanna know about my conquests, do you?” Grant grins.

“I imagine you are immortal, so I imagine there’s been quite a few.”

“I am. Immortal,” Grant says.

Neal feels his jaw tighten a bit at the admission, and something in his chest grows heavy. He lets it go.

“That’s my question right there,” he says. “You sent me to that museum. She was your wife.”

She was his wife, and she had no idea. That day he already knew more about Grant than his own wife did.

Grant keeps looking at the painting, his face impenetrable. “She tried to rob me,” he says, and smiles. “That’s how we met. Her name is Penelope. She had my sense of humor, a love for human virtues, and a disdain for human baseness. We travelled across the world liberating art.”

“But she thinks you’re dead. She has no idea who you are, _what_ you really are.”

Grant shrugs, and his smile grows melancholy. “Oscar Warren James was an art thief for her. A brilliant inventor. And it was wonderful, for a while. She liked the adventure, and she isn’t unhappy with her life now, but I—I can’t very well lie to her for the rest of time, can I? So Oscar had to pass away.”

“Didn’t you ever try to tell her the truth?”

“I didn’t have to try—I know she couldn’t take it. She didn’t want the truth, she wanted the fantasy.”

“That’s a pretty big thing to assume,” Neal mutters.

Grant arches an eyebrow at him. “I never assume, I always know. I know what people wish for better than they do.” And Neal knows that to be very true, so he can’t argue with that.

He wonders how many others there have been like Penelope. It seems impertinent to ask, so he doesn’t. It’s not what he wants to ask anyway. He wants to ask if he’s at all different. If there is a parade of temporary companions in Grant’s past, and he’s just the most recent one of many, or if he’s one of a kind. He doesn’t know how that would work, anyway, but he knows in his bones that he doesn’t want any kind of life other than this: the endless journey, the high of changing the world, and the relief of Grant’s companionship.

“Are you feeling up for a little trip?” Grant asks him suddenly. He looks dangerously mischievous, and it makes Neal shiver, but in a pleasant way.

“Where are we going?” he asks with an easy smile, swallowing the other thing.

“I think it’s high time I introduced you around.”

——o——

The Rainbow Club looks so familiar when they arrive that something aches inside of him at the sight. Grant has offered to drive them this time—the first time he ever has, even though Neal already knew the route and recognized halfway that they were going to Danver. It was a gesture of a sort, although Neal hesitates to assign meaning to it, one way or another.

The club is dimly lit, like before, and Neal wonders if it ever opens. It must be beautiful when it does: its neon modernity meeting the art deco of the twenties.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Ray steps out of the shadows, wearing the same secretive smile, like he knows all kinds of unearthed wisdoms.

“Ray,” Neal can’t help the biggest grin. He walks up to him and hugs the hell out of the man. Ray startles, then laughs, and pats Neal on the back.

“You don’t have any packages for me, do you?” he chuckles.

“Not today,” Grant says. “Get me and my friend a room.”

“Just the one?” Ray smirks.

“Just the one,” Grant says, because he doesn’t sleep, not because of anything else. Neal still flushes red, even though he thought he’s gotten used to his compulsory flirting.

Ray nods and reaches for the keys behind the counter. “Here you go, Neal. Lucky number thirteen.”

“Uh-huh,” Neal says, politely raising his eyebrows.

“The other thing is an old wife’s tale,” Grant says conspiratorially.

Neal looks in between them and shakes his head. “You two are real dicks.”

Both of them just laugh.

“Go and relax,” Grant tells him. “Come down at midnight. Meet some friends of mine.”

Neal shivers at the notion, at the way he says it, and nods mechanically.

Upstairs, he makes himself presentable. It’s a pleasure, too: this is a nicer place than he has stayed at in a while, Grant’s house notwithstanding, and they didn’t really stay there for long. When he comes down, the place is unrecognizable.

The eclectic clash of styles is even more bizarre and beautiful than Neal imagined. But really, it’s the crowd. Neal is only starting to take them all in, the bright colors, when somebody bumps into him. When he turns around, it’s the gentleman with the khol-rimmed eyes, his hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing a short-sleeved shirt so that his tattoos are on display.

“Sorry about that, Neal,” he says. “Nice to see you’ve made it.”

“I’ve made it?” Neal echoes.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” the man slaps him on the shoulder. “Good on you, not caving in. I’m not one for wishes. One guy once asked me to turn everything he touches to gold, and it did not go well for him, let me tell you.” He winks, and heads off to wherever it is he was going before bumping into Neal, who is left there, standing and wondering if he really just met the wine god Dionysus in the flesh.

Looking around, he realizes that no one here is human. He doesn’t know how he knows it, he just does. Perhaps it’s the way they are with one another, perhaps it’s a faint trace of magic that he has learnt to pick up on, but all of them are not of this world. He’s pretty sure the man with sunglasses on and an elaborate goatee is a djinn, and the woman in a cerulean blue dress he’s conversing with has a dragon tattoo running across her back, and Neal thinks she herself might very well be a Chinese dragon. Even Ray, who’s here somewhere—he signs his contracts with blood, doesn’t he?

He makes his way to the bar that is left untended, and figures Ray will forgive him for taking a few liberties. He steps behind the counter and pours himself a club soda: he isn’t about to start drinking in this company.

As he’s fiddling with the glass, a woman stops at the bar. Tall, taller than him, with long black hair tied into a braid. She’s wearing a tank top, cutoff denim shorts, and moccasins that wrap around her ankles. Past the shoulder strap of her top Neal can see a tattoo, and he ends up angling himself awkwardly, staring at it and trying to discern what it is through the cloth. The second he figures it for a wolf, or a coyote, the woman turns around. Her face has broad features and a dark expression.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” she says with a smile full of teeth. “I’m not your kind.”

“Oh, I wasn’t—” he stammers. “I was just—I’m not—I’m sorry,” he finally offers. “I wasn’t trying to offend. I wasn’t looking like that.”

Her eyes are bright, the color of amber. “You really weren’t,” she says with some surprise, and cocks her head, studying him like she’s seeing something other than his face, his skin, the clothes he’s wearing.

“Oh, this one’s taken, darling,” another voice sounds directly behind his shoulder, making him startle. He looks around and finds himself face to face with Vivian. She gives him a smile that falls uncomfortably somewhere between flirtatious and maternal. It doesn’t reach her eyes.

“I’m—what now?” he stammers out, back pressed into the counter.

The smile widens, sharpens. “No need to be coy, Mr. Oliver,” she says. It occurs to him he has never told her his last name, she just knew it. “Are you sleeping with him yet?” she asks, point blank. Her expression remains charming, like she is asking after the weather.

“Pardon me?” Neal manages a mewling sound.

“Well, isn’t that the point?” she asks him, her tone pointedly baffled. “Humans tag along with tricksters for one reason only, darling. They want more wishes.”

Neal blanches, and finally manages to maneuver himself out of the pincer of both of theirs attention. The Coyote Woman keeps a sharp wolfish watch on him.

“Excuse me,” he mutters, setting his club soda loudly on the counter. “I need some air.”

——o——

The waiter Neal met at that fancy restaurant his dad chose is a liar. Is a con. Is there casing him out, and Neal still hasn’t asked if he started seeing things because of Lynn, or if it’s something that has always been there. He knows he’s probably not the first suitor Grant picked for her: she spent a year in prison, after all. There had to have been others he tested.

The hitcher Neal meets a week later is something else entirely. Doesn’t hide from Neal who he is and what he’s done; although he hides a great many other things. But they drive, and there’s a name, and an occupation, and macabre anecdotes of past victims, and Neal gets the impression Grant doesn’t pal around with just anybody.

_One of my best work,_ he says, referring to Tolbert, and _I maaaybe see him once a year,_ Tolbert says. He doesn’t come up to Grant upon noticing him. There is an unspoken boundary there. He doesn’t even know how his wish works. But Neal does. Neal does because it’s not a couple times a year, it’s a couple road trips now, where Neal gets to ask questions, and Grant indulges him, and why? It can’t be just that Neal’s sharp enough to come toe to toe to him. Even keen acumen loses its novelty.

Maybe it just hasn’t happened, is the fear. Maybe there were other companions, until there weren’t. People he’d drive around with, and mess with people.

Neal is on the Interstate 60 for a reason, that first time around. It’s a test of character. A hot girl all but crawls in his lap, and Grant’s eyes are keen and heavy on Neal, watching what he’ll do, if there are lines he won’t cross. _There’s a killer on the loose,_ he says, and it’s a test, to make him a better person. _Help this woman,_ he says, getting out of a car, and it’s another test: you’re afraid to make decisions so badly? Here. Take this new designer drug, and you don’t have to make a single decision in your entire life. Grant navigates him towards his quest markers, teaches him a few valuable lessons, shows him behind the hood, and Neal doesn’t even know if that’s fair, or if it’s a leg up, to understand how Interstate operates, even a little bit.

But among all of that _There’s a museum you would like, I think,_ he says, and there is no test there. Not for Lynn, not for Neal. There are arrogant people there who do not use their eyes, do not appreciate greatness, but that’s not a lesson, Neal has passed that course way early in his life, thank God, no danger of him being that. He is reminded of his dad, a little, but that’s not a lesson either: Neal already knew this about him. This is just art for art’s sake. Something he might like, no strings attached, and he does. He all but pisses himself because these are the greatest paintings of the world, and they are real, and he can stand there and look at the brushstrokes for hours, and there will be no one crowding him, no glaring guards, no guides yammering in seven different languages from every direction. Because that’s what happens when an important piece arrives on loan, doesn’t it? A crowd of onlookers, and you have to bear them out, but this is peaceful. A gift.

But also. She is his _wife_. And he almost stammers out something stupid, and then he sees her guileless eyes and he knows, _believes_, that she has no idea he’s out there and sent him to her. Has no idea what he actually is, apparently, as Neal has recently found out, and what does _that_ mean, then, that he has spent however long with this woman and didn’t tell her a single true thing, she has always been a mark to him, and Neal has known him for a few days, and he already knew more. Not the things she knew, the smiles, the habits, but the things that were true, the things that mattered, and why would he do that? Send him there like they’re friends, like he’s saying, _Here, there’s another piece of me that you can know now,_ and that’s how it starts, probably, that delusion in Neal’s head that they are friends, that gets him on the Interstate 60 for the second time.

Maybe Ray’s right. Maybe it’s just his arrogance, maybe he has always thought he was different, somehow special, and isn’t that a load of bullshit. Maybe, no matter how friendly Grant is with him, he will also always be a mark too. That’s the other fear, isn’t it?

He wants, very badly, for this to be real. He wants, very badly, for this to last.

(And then, of course, there’s the other thing they said, and he shouldn’t spend time focusing on stupid things that aren’t real, these aren’t the questions you want to ask yourself or other people if you want things to last.)

There’s a tight knot in the pit of his stomach by the time Grant finds him, sitting on the steps outside the club, drawing figures with a stick on the ground.

“Tough crowd?” Grant asks. Grant, who has taken him, a nobody, to a gathering of cosmic beings, and that’s another thread Neal can pull at: he’s the only human here, after all.

“Yeah…” he says, crouching even further onto himself.

“Don’t worry about them. Come back inside with me,” Grant says, and Neal imagines their sneering suspicions like a scalding iron of untruth.

“Can we not?” he asks instead.

There’s a shuffling sound, and Grant sits down on the steps beside him.

“Can’t stomach them, huh?” He looks disappointed, somehow. Like it was some sort of a test Neal hasn’t passed. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? That has always been the thing.

“You know I don’t want anything from you, right?” he blurts out, turning to him, and winces, because it sounds ungrateful, and isn’t actually true, but he means what _they_ meant. About the wishes. “There’s no ulterior motive,” he adds quickly.

Grant looks at him calmly, and Neal isn’t sure that he does know. He’s a granter of wishes, and Neal’s a human, and humans have to have been disappointing him for centuries.

“I wouldn’t give you anything anyway,” Grant says flatly, and Neal flushes, because that sounds worse than what he means, too. He, too, means wishes, if Neal went crazy with them, but it sounds more all-encompassing, more forbidding than that. And Neal does want things, wants a lot of things he shouldn’t.

“Okay. Good,” he stammers out. “Just so we’re clear.” He stands up and wipes his jeans, and then starts up again, “It’s just some of your friends have implied—”

“Neal,” Grant stops him gently. “They’re _tricksters_.”

“Right,” Neal nods, and then again, “Right.” Fucking with him, they were fucking with him, and he knows Grant’s quirks, even at his best deadpan, but he doesn’t know them, so they fucked with him. Planted thoughts in his head.

He nods to himself, winding himself down, and Grant looks at him with careful hooded eyes before reaching his hand out and beckoning him with one finger. “Come on. There are other doors to this place.” Neal nods his head, stupidly, and stumbles after Grant. Grant’s stride is light and elegant, as always, but Neal feels like someone tied his shoelaces together and he can’t quite walk right.

They continue in silence until they reach a different door, and Grant stops, and Neal stands there, shuffling his feet, and Grant just watches him. _Penny for your thoughts_ is written across his face, but he doesn’t say anything.

And what Neal is thinking about is the thing that he told himself _not_ to think about. Because that’s how it usually works, and because it’s his greatest character flaw that he cannot abide not having answers. That he wonders about things until they make true and perfect sense.

He thinks about Grant’s eyes, keen and hooded, and all the jokes that Neal brushed off, because that was a sensible thing to do, except maybe he mistook the genre of this completely, and he thinks about his whole _I only do what I enjoy_ grand-standing motto. And he wonders if the thing that Grant enjoys here, about this whole arrangement, has always been him.

“Can I ask you a question?” he says in a low voice.

“Yes, Neal,” Grant answers, like he always does, only not, only no teasing, his voice feels as tight as the air feels, thrumming like a bass string.

“I—_noticed_,” he says, and Grant blinks, a slow heavy blink. “I thought it was just the Interstate,” he says. His voice sounds a little rough. He thinks about the painting again, the painting he saw in Grant’s house, with the woman and her knight, and the thing is, she actually looked nothing like Lynn, but he thought so because of what the painting was about.

“I didn’t know about any tests. I thought it was just a secret dangerous path, and I was making a delivery and looking for a girl, and the obstacles? I didn’t know she wished for them. So I didn’t think much about it, after. About how hard it was for me to get here again. How long it took to find the door, and how immediately I was led away, and every other thing I have seen, it just felt like more of the same, and I didn’t question that it still was so hard. But it’s different now. Has been different for a while. And. I finally noticed,” he says quietly. “So. Tell me. I passed her test of character. Did I pass yours?”

Grant stands there, hands empty of his ever-present accoutrement, hanging limp alongside his body. He looks as out of place as Neal feels. “Yes,” he says, as simple as that. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t do anything else.

And, really, it could mean too many things, because Neal didn’t really ask the right thing. It could have been an audition, for a permanent ticket to this world, and he should rejoice at that notion, he probably would have before he got shot, and saw that painting, and it all dawned on him. What he wants to know now is if Grant’s quest for him was the _same_ as Lynn’s. The very same.

“Never mind,” he exhales, instead of anything he could possibly ask. “Just—forget it.”

He steps back, and prepares to head inside, and this is definitely the only and last time he feels stupid enough to ask this. Grant’s voice stops him.

“Neal,” he says, calm and self-possessed. “Ask your question,” he says, like he has said every time before.

But Neal doesn’t. He watches Grant for a beat of silence, and then strides back to him and crushes their lips together. And there is no pause of hesitation in the impact, the answer is instantaneous, Grant’s arm slipping around his waist and his mouth opening up to him with want, his tongue gently meeting his own, he wants it, has been wanting it, has been wanting him. The thought makes his fingers dig deeper into Grant’s shoulders.

Grant’s other arm snakes around his neck and bends his head, angles their mouths better, and the kissing deepens and becomes something fierce. Neal moans around it, and shoves Grant into the wall, pressing closely against him. He’s taller than Grant is the realization of the moment, followed by the revelation of how exceptional it is to be kissing him. He tears himself away and staggers back a few steps just as abruptly as before.

“Sorry…” he exhales, panting.

“What for?” Grant asks, smiling. He would have still looked composed if not for the redness around his mouth.

“I didn’t meant to—” he waves his hand frantically.

“I’m perfectly okay with wherever this is going,” Grant says, amused, but his features soften at Neal’s obvious panic. “You can do whatever you want here, Neal,” he says gently. He raises his hand and touches the skin on Neal’s neck, a gentle invitation.

Neal leans into the touch like a magnet, like there is nothing in him to resist this.

“I want to do whatever _you_ want…” he says, because it’s true, and Grant blinks, and then steps up and kisses him again. It’s careful, almost reverent, but he kisses like a demi-god, kisses like Neal has never been kissed before.

“Come up to your room with me,” he whispers against Neal’s mouth.

“Yes,” Neal exhales easily. There is no other path from this moment than that.

——o——

He doesn’t kiss Grant immediately when they make it up to the room. He doesn’t know how to start kissing him again. He was brave downstairs, but here, now, he remembers he’s just one human in the presence of someone who defies categorization.

“So it was a quest,” he says instead. “I was right.”

“Yes,” Grant nods. His eyes are cautious, but smiling.

“What was the point, then? What were you trying to find out?”

“Your merit. If you could do this.”

“Do what?”

“Travel with me,” Grant answers carefully. It sounds like he wants to say something else, and carefully arranges a different answer over the truth.

Neal snorts desperately. “You know, this feels like an episode of Doctor Who, and I don’t want to be a replaceable plucky sidekick. If I were tuned into the Interstate, but didn’t get to see you except than on occasion—” he pauses and shakes his head, “—I don’t want that.”

“I don’t want to replace you,” Grant answers simply.

“What do you want?” Neal asks, his voice growing hoarse. The other thing, the kissing and the touching, lingers in the air between them.

Grant smiles. “I would have been glad to have a partner,” he says. “I wasn’t hoping for the other thing.”

It makes something in Neal’s chest pinch, this admission. He takes one step closer.

“I’m just one human,” he says helplessly.

Grant’s smile is soft as he looks at him. “You know that thing you told me a few weeks back? About the stars? You said that some of them must be blindingly bright to be seen from our world. But you said it yourself. Even the most ordinary star can seem the brightest, depending on perspective.”

And apparently that’s how you kiss a god: when he says something so unbelievably tender, and Neal steps further into his space and digs his fingers into his jacket and pulls his mouth to his own.

——o——

He wakes up to a distressingly empty bed. Worse: pristine. The other half is neatly put together, like nothing has happened here the night before. Like there wasn’t a whirlwind—everything.

His heart feels heavy in his chest as he jumps out of the bed and scrambles around the room, collecting his clothes. This seems too mythological: to get everything he wants, but just for one night, while the person who isn’t strictly speaking human slips out under the cover of darkness. _Shit shit shit,_ his heart is hammering against his ribs.

He stumbles down the stairs, a mess of unkempt hair, bleary-eyed. The downstairs is empty, and Neal walks outside, and huddles into his jacket: it’s ungodly early, the sky is still grey, and the air is chilly. He hurries around the corner to where his car is parked. It sits there, lonely and empty, and Neal walks past it, to what seems like an outside veranda, hidden from the view of the street, and that is where he stops.

Grant’s sitting with his back to him, in his familiar tweed costume. He’s toying with the pipe in his hand and conversing quietly. Neal doesn’t hear the words, just the soft murmur of his voice. Opposite of him is Ray, and in front of him a cup of coffee. Which sounds good, actually, as well as a shower, which he skipped in his panicked search. He scrubs at his face and feels like a moron. He should really backtrack—

—Ray’s eyes zero-in on him, hawk-like and black. He crooks his finger in a summoning motion and points to the empty seat beside them. Grant doesn’t turn, doesn’t change his demeanor at all, so Neal allows himself to awkwardly stumble closer and slide into the chair.

“Morning,” he croaks out through his dry throat. Grant turns his head slowly and looks at him softly, and everything about that look makes Neal shiver and swallow hard several times.

“You’ve looked better in a hospital bed, Mr. Oliver,” Ray says.

“Yeah, sorry, I—” he stammers, desperately looking for an explanation that is not pitiful and doesn’t sound like an obvious lie. “Sorry,” he mumbles again, coming up with nothing.

“Nice to be awake, isn’t it?” Ray says, and oh, that is such a loaded statement.

Neal smiles sheepishly, trying to sort out his hair, and says, “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” politely sidestepping the question.

Ray grins and turns his all-seeing eyes back on Grant. “Something tells me you didn’t,” he says mysteriously. “You really think we should?”

“I’d rather thought you would want to,” Grant answers.

Ray shrugs thoughtfully and rises from the table. His hands were busy with his ever-present deck of cards, and he taps it against the surface. “We’ll see about that, won’t we?” he says, and nods at both of them in parting. Grant nods back, and bites around his pipe.

“I’m sorry,” Neal offers as soon as Ray disappears inside. He must have appeared quite bizarre.

“What for?” Grant says.

“If I seemed—” he waves his hand in the air, looking for a word that is more delicate than _‘utterly fucking embarrassing.’_ “I panicked,” he admits instead. “When you weren’t there. Not that you had to be there. I don’t think too well when I wake up,” he offers, instead of explaining how he thought that Grant might have left, and it sent him into an anxiety spiral. “I’m sorry if I made it really obvious that—” (and he omits all the words for what they did because he doesn’t know the right ones) “—for—your friend.”

Grant shrugs uncaringly. “Oh, he knows,” he says.

Neal blinks. “He—oh.” Well, somebody is quite a sharer apparently, he thinks, flushing, and tries to imagine how that conversation went and experiences a failure of imagination.

“He’s always known,” Grant says, studying the trees.

“He—what?” Neal squints suspiciously.

“He’s a cousin to the devil,” Grant says, like Neal should already have figure that one out, “he knows everything well in advance, even better than me.”

“Ah,” Neal says, and sits with that for a while, before rising to his feet as well. “So, I’m gonna take a shower now,” he says, trying not to look like he’s fleeing, (even though maybe he a little bit is), but really, he has done all the things this morning in the wrong order. Grant nods at him, amused, his face saying _You don’t say,_ and he stays seated, his eyes half somewhere else.

——o——

The sun is bright and warm by the time he comes down the second time. The air breathes clean in a way that he’s still not used to. There are tall poplars around, leaves whispering in the breeze, and Grant is still sitting at the same table, listening to them.

There’s a cup of coffee waiting for Neal as he sits down. He doesn’t say anything, letting Grant do his pensive thing in peace. He doesn’t mind the silence. He thought it would be awkward—it used to always be awkward for him, that first morning after, where you don’t know if you should touch the other person, if you should kiss them, if you’re expected to. He doesn’t get this apprehension this time. He knows he can do all of those things, now, or later.

The sun is breaking through the trees in shards, and his fingers are itching for a brush.

“I wouldn’t fuck you over,” Grant says quietly, breaking the silence.

Neal looks at him, frowning, because that’s a bit out of nowhere. Grant’s face is still arranged into a mask of perfect stillness, betraying nothing. Only his shoulders are tense. Neal sets his cup down, and waits for wherever this is going.

“Not on purpose, anyway,” Grant says, and something does a little jump in Neal’s gut, he’s reminded of a certain conversation from a while back. Except it can’t be the same conversation, it cannot possibly be it. He looks at his cup stupidly.

“If not on purpose, then what?” he asks carefully.

Grant looks at him. “By design,” he says simply. Neal waits for him to go on. “For you to travel with me, you’d have to be immortal. You could never have a normal life. You’d have to lie, forever. Watch your sister grow old and die. You think that’s not fucking you over?”

Neal feels his chest hurt. It’s all true, and he’s already feeling the ghost of this pain creeping inside. Maybe it’s just fear.

“Okay,” he says quietly, reluctantly.

“You’d be stuck here,” Grant says. “You’d belong to the Interstate.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It is when you want to escape and you can’t.”

“Why would I want to escape?” Neal asks.

“A person has the capacity for only so many lifetimes,” Grant says. “You’d get fed up with this life eventually. You’ll resent it.”

Neal blinks at him.

“What?” he says. And because his voice breaks, he has to clear his throat. All the things that Neal said last night, all the fears, and now Grant is blindsiding him with this?

“You know why it’s so fun to fuck with people? They never ask for anything they truly want, or should want, or need. They ask for things that aren’t genuine. And then they cannot live with it forever, because they haven’t wanted it in the first place. You could wish for it. Because it will allow me to weave my magic. But it won’t be sincere. It won’t belong with you.”

Neal stares at him in honest wonder.

“Of course it will,” he says.

Grant stares at him sharply, nearly dangerously, and it sends a shiver down Neal’s arms, and by God that should not be arousing.

“You wish to be _immortal_?” Grant asks him. “Is that a recent development I’m unaware of?”

“No,” Neal chuckles and reaches out towards him, but doesn’t touch him. He feels light suddenly, light enough to laugh.

Neal may be dumb sometimes, but he isn’t stupid. And this may actually be the smartest he’s been in his life. Because Grant’s angry—in as much as he ever gets angry, which is very little, but it’s there. He’s angry at all these reasons he’s naming, but the thing is: Neal hasn’t asked, has never asked, Grant’s just offered. And he’s angry at the unpredictability of this offer, at all the reasons why he imagines it’s a bad idea and yet he cannot stop wanting it anyway, in what is possibly his most human moment. That he wants—no, _wishes_, for the first time in his entire everything—for Neal to say yes, and for it to be simple.

“I don’t really wanna live forever,” Neal says, honestly. “Frankly, it terrifies me, for all the reasons you just said. But that’s only a word here. And I believe you when you say that wishes turn bad when not meant from the heart, from the core of your being, and the thing is, the first time we met? It was still insincere. It was just a bullshit answer I gave for the benefit of my family. But this thing. If I were to wish for it. Would be the most sincere thing I have ever felt in my life.”

“And what do you imagine you’d be wishing for?” Grant asks, his voice still grave and dangerous.

Neal looks at him, and smiles. Looks at his obscene red hair, at his dark intent stare, and the crow’s feet around his eyes, and the worrying movement of his mouth. A mouth that he, improbably, incredulously, has felt on his own, knows the shape, the taste, the secrets of. And he thinks he’s never been surer of anything in his life.

“You,” he says simply. “I want you. Don’t you know that by now? I’m not afraid of the Interstate, and I want you to show me how it works, but I’m not here for the road. I want this. For us to have a happy ending instead of an expiration date. To be free and not worry and be sure of my future, and that’s a hell of a lot of words, but they all fall under the same three letters, and,” he laughs then, “you think you get to be afraid that I might not want it? I am just one human, and I know I’m different for you from the others, but I don’t know that I’m that different that you’d want me by your side forever. You think I won’t escape you? What about when you’d want to escape me?”

And he’s still smiling, because that fear is gone now, somehow. It’s all gone because he offered, and got angry at himself for offering, and Neal has seen this man naked, but this is the first time he has actually seen him vulnerable, and that makes it all okay.

“If there was anything I could wish for,” he says quietly, “I’d wish for you.” And he feels distinctly unembarrassed over saying it, and looks at Grant with all the simple unadorned truth of it and says it again, and _means_ it, in all the scary possibility of saying something like that in front of a trickster. “I wish for you.”

Grant’s face changes imperceptibly. (Neal’s not kidding himself that this is somehow a novel wish in his repertoire. Other people must have been in love with him before. People must have lusted after him, too. He has fulfilled some of those wishes, Neal imagines. For a time. He wonders how many of them have been insincere. All, he wants to think, because the possibility of there being someone like him, someone true, someone who got refused, is, devastating. And he’s not thinking about it.) His face changes not for that, but because Neal has been with him for months now, and the only rule he kept to was that he knew not to make wishes anymore. Not around Grant, not around anyone. Time and again, he said he’d never wish for anything, not even on a shooting star, not even in jest, not even for a glass of water, because he knows how that could potentially turn out. He said, in fact, that he’d never wish for anything of Grant, because he frankly didn’t trust him not to fuck him over. And here he was. Wishing for the most vulnerable thing. Offering up the most fragile part of himself.

“Okay, then,” Grant says, and takes Neal’s hand. And the eyes of his monkey-pipe glow green.

——//——

**  
**


	4. Epilogue

_Blueberry Hill_ is their favorite comfort food place. Half a diner, half a museum. A collection of porcelain musketeers greets Nancy as she enters, and she is only slightly mollified by the sight and the choice of venue—after a month of radio silence, followed by three more months of intermittent here-and-there texts and phone calls she isn’t about to let it slide.

When she approaches the table, she is startled to discover that Neal isn’t alone. Sitting with him is a sharply dressed, outrageously red-haired gentleman. They are having a quiet conversation. The gentleman is wearing a sardonic smile.

“Neal,” she calls out uncertainly, making him jump up.

“Nancy!” he says excitedly, and rises out of his chair to pull her into a hug. She returns it with abandon, and for a moment that’s all there is. Them, the wonder siblings, against the whole world. He releases her reluctantly, and offers her a seat, and she stares curiously at the other gentleman.

“Nancy, this is Grant,” Neal says.

“I… know you, don’t I?” she says, suddenly placing his face. “You’re from that art exhibition.”

“Conrad Gallery,” Mr. Grant nods, pleased. “Pleasure to meet you, Nancy, Neal talks wonders about you.” And she can’t help it, she smiles at his easy charm.

“God, I’ve forgotten all about that!” Neal says, surprised, and gives his friend an admonishing could-have-warned-me look. Mr. Grant smirks. It’s a familiar display that reminds Nancy of something, but in that elusive way you have to actively try and hold on to in order to examine it for any clues. But it’s gone too fast, and she has to let it go.

“So… what’s going on, Nealo?” she asks carefully, and leans in to quietly whisper, “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“What?” he frowns. “No! Why would you say that?”

“Oh, excuse me, because!” she huffs in exasperation. “Because voluntary socializing has stopped being a thing for you suddenly. Because I haven’t seen you in months, and now that I do, you show up with company. No offense,” she looks at Mr. Grant apologetically. She really didn’t want to cause a scene. (Mr. Grant shrugs his _none taken _back at her, only looking entertained.) “I mean, I would have thought after this long I would at least be entitled to have you to myself. Were you secretly in jail? Are you on parole?”

“God, Nance, no! No,” Neal is both horrified and amused by the idea, and laughs, despite his discomfort. He rubs the back of his neck and sighs. “God. There’s so much I have to tell you. About where I’ve been, what I’m doing now. It’s all gonna sound a little crazy.” He looks over at his friend, who smiles back in a manner that seems encouraging, and it still tugs at something familiar inside Nancy’s brain. “But,” Neal goes on. “There’s just this one thing, first.”

He falls silent, and fidgets uncomfortably for a good solid minute before finally contorting himself into a half-hunched pose, making a pouring out gesture with his arms, and he says, “We’re together, Nance. As in, seeing each other. Romantically,” he adds, when she says nothing.

Nancy sits there, dumbstruck, and tries to rearrange her entire world view in the span of a few seconds, to catch up with this conversation.

“Oh,” she says, and falls silent and studies her napkin. She is definitely not prepared to have this talk in front of a stranger, though she understands how Neal might find his presence comforting, all things considered.

“Oh?” Neal prompts her, his enthusiasm wilting. Nancy bites her lip. “Are you—you’re not mad, are you?”

“I don’t know, Neal,” she says dishonestly, because, truthfully, she is. “It’s like you’re a different person.” His face elongates. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she says quickly. “If that’s who you are, then I’m glad you have figured it out, I’m happy for you, of course I am. But. We used to tell each other everything. And this is so big, and I wasn’t there for any of it. Not for your revelation, not for—anything. It’s like I don’t know you anymore.”

“Nance,” he smiles at her reconciliatorily. “Nance, I’ll tell you everything. In painstaking detail, even. You’ll get it, I promise, I know what you’re saying and this is why I wanted this whole thing to happen, because I don’t want to lose us. I want you to know it all, everything that’s happened to me. This is why Grant’s here, because I can’t tell this story on my own, you just wouldn’t believe me. I wanted him to show you.” He looks at Grant. “I can’t do what he does. I’m still learning.”

“…Is that an art thing?” Nancy squints, confused and a little weirded out.

“Some would call what I do art,” Grant nods thoughtfully.

“You call what you do art,” Neal replies, and there’s that look again, and she can read it clearly this time, the affection in Neal’s sardonic roll of the eyes, and how it’s mirrored in Grant’s smile that he’s hiding into his funny-looking pipe.

“Okay,” she says, relaxing, and putting on a smile, for Neal’s sake, because whatever else this is, he’s happy, she has never seen him this brilliantly happy. “Okay,” she says again, and sits forward. “Tell me everything.”

——o——

“So, what is it that you wanted to show me?” Neal asks, coming downstairs of the Rainbow Club. They have ended up staying here for longer than Neal was expecting—not that he minds.

Ray and Grant are crowded over a table, and Grant waves him over. “Come look at this,” he says, and shows him a parchment. A parchment that seems to be a part of the Interstate come to live. There are pictures in pencil and ink swirling on its surface.

“What do you see, Mr. Oliver?” Ray asks.

“Pictures moving on a parchment?” he says carefully.

“Interesting,” he says, and him and Grant exchange a look.

“Is that not what I’m supposed to see?” he looks between them. Somehow, this type of question is his new normal.

“I see a bowl of water, and reflections in it,” Grant says, and touches the parchment with a flat hand. His palm, when he raises his arm, comes away wet. Neal blinks at it.

“Okay,” he says, resolved to take it in stride, like he has everything else leading up to this.

“The Interstate has many ways to show us what we want,” Ray says, and points to the non-parchment. “This one’s rare. A selfless wish.”

The inks and graphite swirl again, and Neal sees an outline of a man lying in a hospital bed.

“He has wished for his brother to be his true self again,” Grant says.

“Sounds dangerous,” Neal says warily.

“No more dangerous than wishing for an answer,” Grant shrugs eloquently. “We like things broad. Gives us more room to work.” Neal smiles, amused.

“So what’s wrong with his brother?”

“He has hardened his heart, has skewed himself over to being single-mindedly pragmatic,” Ray says.

“He’s pushing his children onto the road that makes sense to him but will make them unhappy. So imagine, you can do anything you want. What would you do to change him?” Grant looks at him with rapt attention.

Neal is silent for a while, embarrassed to talk when put on a spot like that, but eventually he gathers himself up. “Okay. Maybe this is stupid, but, a few weeks back we passed by a store that sold real dreamcatchers, and you stopped by it, and granted the woman weaving them a small wish. But it got me thinking, when you said they were real, what if they weren’t for catching nightmares. What if they were for catching dreams, as in hopes and dreams. And I’m thinking now, what if we put a place like that on the highway, and he ends up there, among people who hire these catchers of dreams to strip their children of fantasies and imagination so that they can ship them off to business schools, or wherever it is they see the most potential. I’m thinking, what if we build him up to be the hero who restores free will. That might jog him right up.”

He looks at them, and Ray and Grant exchange a look: Ray tips an invisible hat off to Grant, and Grant looks smug, more so than usual.

Ray smirks at Neal, and then produces a quill, seemingly out of thin air. Like he was ready for it. “Have at it, then,” he says. “You’re one of the Architects of this highway now. So why don’t you design this quest.”

Neal looks at him, then looks at Grant. “Really?” he asks.

“Really, Neal,” he says, with a lazy indulgent smile. “Show us what you’ve got in that brain of yours.”

Neal looks down at the parchment again, and the picture has reformed into one of a highway, as it circles around the entire country. And the road trip continues onward.


End file.
